In a world inundated with Japanimation, the slick, plastic, comic book-inspired artworks of Takashi Murakami, and the latest in technological Japanese wares, it is difficult to accept that traditional Japanese aesthetics once favored shadow and darkness over a well-lighted place; softness and diffusion over clear, hard edges; reticence and emptiness over noise and clutter, the mellowness of age over the sparkle of the new.

When cultures collide, however, cultures change. Japan’s collision with Western Modernism marked the end of one era and the beginning of another. That transition is the subject, explored through industrial design — specifically chairs — of the Noguchi Museum’s superb cross-cultural exhibition “Design: Isamu Noguchi and Isamu Kenmochi.”

For Japan, the increasing desire during the late 19th and early 20th centuries to emulate all things Western was a devil’s bargain that traded culture for foreign-born progress. Modern noisy appliances disrupted contemplative spaces, and electric lights flooded Japanese homes and temples, rendering mute the subtlety and mysteriousness of their art and architecture, as well as their way of life. Rather than try to meld Japanese and Western sensibilities, most American-inspired products made in Japan well into the mid-20th century were neither Japanese nor Western but merely Frankensteinian imitations. Meanwhile, a whole industry arose in Japan around the West’s desire for cheap “Japonica” — so-called exotic goods manufactured for export. Ironically, modern Western designers, Isamu Noguchi and Frank Lloyd Wright among them, inspired by traditional Japanese aesthetics, were producing superior work on Western soil.

“Design: Isamu Noguchi and Isamu Kenmochi,” organized by Noguchi Museum curator Bonnie Rychlak, explores the collaboration between two men who changed all that — Isamu Noguchi (1904–88) and Isamu Kenmochi (1912–71). Noguchi, born in Los Angeles to an American mother and a Japanese father, apprenticed with Brancusi in Paris. Noguchi was a masterful abstract sculptor, industrial designer, architect, and set designer who embraced the art and cultures of America, Europe, and Japan. In 1950, during his first postwar visit to Japan, Noguchi met, and struck up a friendship with, Kenmochi, Japan’s most important Modernist industrial designer. For approximately two years, they worked collaboratively at the Industrial Arts Research Institute in Tokyo.

Together, and separately, Noguchi and Kenmochi introduced innovative Modernist furniture and interior- and industrial-design objects into Japan, as well as the West. Embracing traditional Japanese crafts, forms, and materials, their designs bridged ancient and modern, industry and handicraft, Eastern and Western, without losing Japan’s cultural heritage in the process.

“Noguchi and Kenmochi,” comprising approximately 85 items — furniture, light fixtures, design objects, drawings, and photography — begins, not surprisingly, with a chair. Kenmochi saw the chair as an important symbolic bridge between East and West, and, inspired by Noguchi’s furniture designs, he was intent on designing one that was Japanese in sensibility. The introduction of the chair was a major step toward modernization in Japan, where, until the 1920s — when chairs first entered the country — the tatami mat, placed on the floor, was the traditional mode of seating and reclining.

The collaborative chair, the “Basket Chair” (1950), was initially conceived by Kenmochi and incorporated traditional Japanese bamboo basket weaving. Noguchi suggested that the frame be made of a looping, bent iron rod instead of wood, which gives the chair the look of two open-weave baskets, a pin cushion for the seat and a curving horizontal tube for the back, suspended on Hardoy’s butterfly chair frame. The chair was never manufactured and the prototype was lost. Working from photographs, however, one was re-created for the exhibition.

Although the “Basket Chair” is not the most exciting design in the exhibit, it is strikingly fresh, iconic, and completely of its time; and, with its hybrid nature — distinctly both Modernist and Japanese (what Kenmochi termed “Japanese Modern”) — its arrival suggests the discovery of a missing link.

Other memorable designs by Kenmochi include “Round Chair” (1960), “Kashiwado Chair” (1961), and “Bamboo Chair” (1950). Another design replicated for the exhibition, and similar to the “Basket Chair,” “Bamboo Chair” comprises two bamboo basket sleeves, each open at both ends, suspended on an iron rod frame. Viewed head-on or from the rear, its open seat resembles a wide clown grin. “Round Chair,” a roundish tightly woven rattan form that hugs the floor (there is also a settee version), is a warm, inviting chair. Womb-like yet open, airy yet sturdy, austere yet welcoming, it suggests a seed-pod and the large palm of a hand. Looking down at its round seat cushion, which comes in different solid colors and pushes to the edge of the chair, is like peering at a large tongue in a wide-open mouth. The combination of associations — organic, humorous, somewhat threatening, somewhat soothing — gives this classic design the feel of a living organism. The U-shaped “Kashiwado Chair,” named after a famous sumo wrestler, is made of six stacked blocks of solid Japanese cedar. Stout, low to the ground, and wide-bodied, the chair is as imposing as a bulldog. However, open, somewhat splayed, and curved in at its base, the chair also has the presence of a balloon hovering just above the floor.

Kenmochi’s designs are interspersed with those by Noguchi, including his beautiful organic coffee tables, chairs, stools, and the Akari paper light fixtures, as well as ashtrays that resemble seashells and industrial design drawings that look more like studies of bones, crustaceans, microscopic organisms, and seedpods than lighting fixtures or furniture.

The melding of organic form, natural materials, and functionality was always present in Noguchi’s industrial designs; these are traditional Japanese design traits, after all. Kenmochi’s oeuvre shows a unique and brilliant sensibility. But it is also evident that Noguchi’s work must have helped the younger designer — pulled equally toward Aalto, Mies, and the Katsura Palace — to find his roots, to ground himself, and to branch outward. And Kenmochi was not alone.

It was the birth and fruition of the collaboration between Noguchi and Kenmochi that enabled Japan’s artists, designers, and architects to embrace what was particularly Japanese about European Modernism — to understand how quintessentially Japanese is the edict: “Less is more.”

Until May 25 (32-37 Vernon Boulevard at 33rd Road, Long Island City, Queens, 718-204-7088).