‘small MUJI’ exhibition: Tatsuya Tanaka x MUJI in New York City – All photos are courtesy of MUJI.

Design. At MUJI’s flagship store at 475 Fifth Avenue in New York City, design enthusiasts can experience small MUJI, an innovative collaboration between the Japanese retail brand and renowned miniature photographer and mitate artist Tatsuya Tanaka. As part of NYCxDESIGN 2025, this miniature art exhibition features meticulously crafted dioramas, made using everyday MUJI products—think clipboards as building facades or cotton swabs as streetlamps.

• RELATED STORIES: Explore more highlights from NYCxDESIGN 2025 on Archipanic.

Tanaka’s practice draws on the Japanese tradition of mitate, a method of seeing one thing in the guise of another, which lets ordinary objects take on fresh significance. By reframing the familiar through an unexpected lens, his art sparks curiosity and playful connections.

Commissioned exclusively for NYCxDESIGN 2025, three bespoke dioramas celebrate the city’s most iconic landmarks: a Central Park picnic is arranged atop stationery, the Times Square skyline is rendered in tiny rubber stamps, capturing the bustle of neon lights and towering billboards, and the Statue of Liberty is crafted from translucent MUJI acrylic products.

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Alongside these three New York-inspired scenes, visitors can discover sixteen additional artworks—each crafted entirely from MUJI products—that have travelled with the exhibition from Tokyo.

Tanaka’s miniature vignettes are so arresting in their capacity to coax wonder from the ordinary. By placing a hotel room within the crisp edges of a sandwich biscuit or unfolding a seaside tableau inside wide-fit denim pants, he prompts us to rethink our relationship with the everyday objects in our lives.

Tanaka has reimagined a MUJI ABS stapler as a bustling pizza parlour, soap dispensers become platforms for divers, while farmers harvest the bristles of shoe-dusting brushes. One diorama showcases an urban landscape built with socket boards that mimic skyscrapers; in another scene, a group of campers relax under tree-like broccoli.

In a world where design is often equated with bold statements and grand gestures, “small MUJI” reminds us that ingenuity can reside in the most modest of forms. “small MUJI” offers a delightful invitation: to look closer, imagine bigger, and rediscover the hidden stories woven into the fabric of the everyday.

All photos are courtesy of MUJI.