Oki Sato, who heads the firm Nendo, is one brightest talents in a new generation of Japanese minimalist designers. Just 32 years old, Newsweek had already dubbed him one of the 100 Most Respected Japanese, only four years out of grad school, in 2006. His designs have seldom been seen in the U.S.--but that changes with " Ghost Stories: New Works from Nendo," a new show at New York's Museum of Art and design which runs through January 10.

The chairs visible in the background of the previous picture are one of Nendo's first instant classics, the Cabbage Chair. It comes as a tube of tightly rolled paper layers, which are then peeled by hand, to create the sitting surface. (It's currently on display in MoMA's permanent collection--in the top-floor design galleries, when you first walk in.)

Sato's new work carries minimalism towards it's logical conclusion: Objects that seem to disappear entirely. His Fade-Out chair is made of plastic that's been delicately hand painted to resemble wood...

...but the paint fades at the legs, making the chair appear to float.

Sato is showing the chairs on a white floor that fades to wood--Get it? Wood fades to white in the chair; white fades to wood on the floor. The chairs seem to float in midair.

The Cord chair was an attempt to made a wooden chair that's so thin that it's almost invisible in profile.

In the show, the chairs are displayed on a chunky plinth, to show off their thinness.

Here's the trick: The wood would ordinarily snap, but it's been painstakingly embedded with a metal skeleton.

The Phantom Waves vase looks pretty simple, right? But the waves that divide the vase--and which make it look like a segmented length of bamboo--are actually optical illusions. The perspex tube has been precisely polarized in certain sections; the waves appear when you look through two layers at once. But there's actually nothing there--the sticks you see aren't poking through anything.

A detail of the effect

On the back wall of the exhibit, you can see the vases lined up in a row.

A detail of the fade-out paint job, which appears throughout the exhibit.

Sato's Blown-Color lamps are insanely delicate: To craft them, Sato invented a process for "blowing" a special polyester that becomes ductile when heated, and retains its shape when cooled.

The process is meant to evoke the process of hand-blowing glass, which looking like traditional Japanese paper lanterns.