Prada unveiled Chawan Cabinet inside its new Prada Home space on Via Montenapoleone and places American artist Theaster Gates at its center. Launched during Milan Design Week and positioned within a permanent retail environment, the Project structures the space through Japanese ceramics, tea objects, and Prada Home pieces, creating a controlled domestic environment built on Japanese ceramic traditions.
Chawan tea bowls, guinomi cups, tokkuri vessels, and sculptural vases structure the installation. Theaster Gates presents works from his studio alongside pieces by Taira Kuroki, Yuichi Hirano, Koichi Ohara, and Shion Tabata.
The Ceremony of the Everyday
From here, Gates installs a long wooden table at the center of the room and builds the layout around it. Modular metal shelving carries stacked ceramics in dense groupings. A cabinet from his personal collection presents works from his 1,000 tea bowl project completed in 2023. The arrangement follows sequence and accumulation, placing the objects into a continuous field.
Within this logic, the ceramic floor tiles developed with Mizuno Seitoen Lab cover the ground plane, while the plaster walls introduce an earthy surface treatment. The material palette aligns architecture and objects into one system and the vintage turntables distribute a sound program curated by Gates across the rooms.
The experience deepens in the inner courtyard, where a traditional Japanese tea house rises from a grid of tatami modules. Plaster and greenery frame the structure. During the launch period, invited guests can participate in tea ceremonies led by Japanese tea masters, ritual use as activation, intimacy built into the program.
Prada Frames Symposium
Running in parallel across the city, Prada Frames In Sight brought its annual symposium to a close at Santa Maria delle Grazie, one of Milan's most storied architectural complexes. Curated by design and research studio Formafantasma, the three-day gathering placed intellectual inquiry at the center of Design Week, bringing together cultural figures across a program that grew more layered with each session.
This year's edition trained its focus on image-making: how images shape the self, produce knowledge, and construct the way the world is seen and imagined. It is a question that feels urgent in a cultural moment defined by the dominance of representation over lived experience, and Formafantasma built a program sharp enough to hold it.
Over three days, the symposium drew a remarkable breadth of voices, from Paola Antonelli and Alvaro Barrington in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist on day one, to Deborah Willis, Joanna Piotrowska, and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun on day two, closing with Mark Leckey, Ed Atkins, Jonas Staal, and Alfredo Jaar on the final day. All sessions were introduced and contextualized by Alice Rawsthorn, with performative reading visits threading participants through the architecture of Santa Maria delle Grazie across the full program.
