Two years ago, I left behind a 20-year career in Milan, as a filmmaker and visual storyteller to follow a persistent itch to find a new path in Kyoto. My soul had been seduced by the city's legends of gods and goddesses, and by that wonderful Japanese ability to create perfection from the beauty of imperfection.

I had come to Japan drawn by its culture and visual language. Living in Kyoto deepened that fascination. Here, craftsmanship, materials and aesthetics are not confined to museums or galleries; they are part of the fabric of everyday life. Tradition and innovation exist side by side, often without appearing to be in conflict.

Then, through a serendipitous conversation with a rather strange English professor of the Pureosity Laboratory at Kyoto University, I was invited to explore how I might use my craft as a visual storyteller to communicate the work his group was developing: a new technology for producing the color white in polymers through the simple control of structure formation.

Professor Sivaniah's work, recently published in Nature, produces not only white materials but also water-repellent surfaces through a foaming process. What struck me most, however, was the artist hidden inside the scientist. He wanted to express the science through images inspired by masterpieces such as Vermeer's paintings and the Mona Lisa.

He gave me one mission:

Don't just create a bridge between science and art. Be the one who crosses the bridge, and takes the science back to the art world.

And so, I entered a chemistry laboratory and took my first steps towards becoming a Scientartist.

Professor Sivaniah encouraged me not simply to look, but to participate. With no previous experience in a laboratory, within a year I had become involved in scaling the printing technology from centimeters to meters. I learned by watching, doing, listening and even smelling— iteratively eliminating variables as we attempted a ten-thousand-fold increase in scale.

But it wasn't only about scaling up. 

I began creating my own artworks, exploring a creative fusion of video, physical art, digital imagery and experimental approaches. The laboratory itself became a place of artistic experimentation.

Having mastered the creation of art using the laboratory's DFP technology, Professor Sivaniah then told me it was time to cross the bridge again—to connect the technology with the artistic heart of Kyoto.

That made me think more deeply about the functionality of whiteness and water repellency, and how these properties have traditionally been expressed through Japanese craftsmanship.

Whiteness is created by the scattering of light, and can therefore help create a cooling surface. This made me think of Japanese uchiwa fans and higasa parasols. A few decades ago, these were strongly associated with women's traditional dress and culture; today, everyone carries their modern equivalents—portable electric fans and reflective parasols—to protect themselves from increasingly oppressive summer heat.

But the story goes beyond heat.

Traditional Japanese umbrellas, or wagasa, are made from paper treated with oil to make them water-resistant. Modern versions increasingly rely on synthetic materials and coatings, some of which can involve PFAS-type water-repellent chemistry. Sivaniah's technology offers the possibility of creating water-repellent surfaces without PFAS.

Slowly, an image began to emerge: a fusion of sustainable materials, advanced science and traditional Japanese art.

And then came what felt like a dream.

Armed with this new technology, I was introduced to Sumii-san, the latest descendant and Head of Komaruya, a Kyoto Craft Family with a thousand-year history and one of Japan's oldest traditions of making uchiwa. We have begun exploring how our technologies might be combined to create exquisitely crafted fans used by some of Kyoto's leading geisha houses.

There is another connection that fascinates me.

Geisha wear distinctive white face paint, known as oshiroi, as do traditional Noh and Kabuki performers. Historically, some forms of white face paint contained lead, until such materials were banned because of their toxicity.

So I began to wonder: what if one day we could create oshiroi using this new technology?

Perhaps that is what becoming a Scientartist really means.

It is not simply putting science and art next to each other. It is allowing one to change the way you see the other.

My journey has taken me from Italian television broadcasting, through two decades of filmmaking and visual storytelling, into the laboratories and craft houses of Kyoto. I still don't know exactly where it will lead.

But I have a dream.

One day, I hope to take what I have learned in Kyoto—the technology, the craftsmanship and the idea that science and art can belong to the same creative process—and bring it back to Europe.

And what better place to do that than Milan, my home town, and perhaps the greatest design stage of them all, Milan Design Week!