Table of Contents

1. Key Highlights:
2. Introduction
3. From Clay Apprenticeship to a Cabinet in Milan
4. Chawan, Yunomi and Tokkuri: Objects That Carry Practice
5. Afro‑Mingei: Reworking Mingei for a Black Aesthetic Practice
6. Surface, Glaze and Kiln: The Technical Conversations
7. Sound, Furniture and the Domestic Scene
8. Prada, Retail and the Politics of Space
9. Makers on View: Japanese Ceramicists and Cross‑Cultural Exchange
10. Public Programming and the Social Life of Objects
11. Material Stories: Clay Handbags, Reclaimed Wood and Objects of Use
12. Gates in Context: Past Projects and Ongoing Ambitions
13. Cultural Sensibilities: Wabi‑Sabi, Imperfection and New Values
14. Reading the Room: Visitor Experience and Interpretive Possibilities
15. The Market Question: Saleability, Accessibility and Collecting
16. What Chawan Cabinet Signals for Craft, Fashion and Institutional Practice
17. Real‑World Parallels and Comparisons
18. Questions of Authorship and Curatorship
19. Looking Ahead: Legacy and Potential Futures
20. FAQ

Key Highlights:

• Theaster Gates transformed a Prada Home retail space in Milan into "Chawan Cabinet," an earthen installation centering Japanese tea bowls and his 1,000‑tea‑bowl project to explore repetition, domesticity and ritual.
• The exhibition stages a deliberate encounter between Black craft aesthetics and Japanese mingei (folk craft) principles—what Gates calls “Afro‑Mingei”—through curated objects, custom ceramics, reclaimed furniture and soundscapes.
• Gates designed the room from floor to fixtures: antique apothecary cabinet, modular metal shelving, custom tiles with Mizuno Seitoen Lab, plastered walls, a reclaimed‑wood table and a courtyard for tea ceremonies, blurring retail, ritual and public practice.

Introduction

A quiet room on Via Montenapoleone, one of Milan’s most polished shopping streets, has been given the kind of rough, tactile attention that usually lives in workshops and backyards. Theaster Gates, an artist whose practice has repeatedly moved between social engagement, urban repair and ceramics, has repurposed a Prada Home space into Chawan Cabinet: a gallery‑like sanctuary of clay that centers the tea bowl at the intersection of craft, ritual and daily life.

The installation is not a simple display of objects. Gates shipped an antique apothecary cabinet from his Chicago studio to fill with dozens of his tea bowls, while modular shelves hold works from Japanese ceramicists alongside Prada Home tableware. He commissioned ceramic tiles, plastered the walls with straw‑flecked earthen plaster and set a vintage record player to run alongside the tactile forms of clay. The outcome reads as a meditation on touch, repetition and the human traces left in domestic objects—an argument about how objects carry memory, and how a major fashion house can host a small, deliberate study in making.

This project asks a number of overlapping questions: how does ritual translate across cultures? What happens when a retail footprint becomes a site for contemplative craft? How does Gates’s Afro‑Mingei vocabulary reshape understandings of craft and identity? Chawan Cabinet offers answers that are material, spatial and social, woven through pottery, wood, plaster and sound.

From Clay Apprenticeship to a Cabinet in Milan

Theaster Gates’s relationship with ceramics traces back decades. In the 1990s he spent a formative year in Japan studying pottery, an experience that left him with enduring ties and an appreciation for Japanese approaches to craft. That time is visible here not as imitation but as a dialog. Gates returned to clay again and again—through workshops, community programming and exhibitions—always treating making as a site of social exchange as much as formal exploration.

The apothecary cabinet at the centre of Chawan Cabinet was not sourced for the show; it came from Gates’s own studio. He filled its weathered drawers and shelves with chawan—tea bowls used for matcha and other tea practices—drawn from his long‑running 1,000 tea bowl project. That project, an exercise in replication, glaze experimentation and the study of subtle variation, produces hundreds of similar but distinct bowls. Close inspection reveals the hand at work: uneven rims, finger marks, drips, and individualized glaze behaviors. These are not industrial multiples. Each bowl registers a maker’s decisions and the kiln’s alchemy.

Surrounding the cabinet, modular metal shelving stretches across one wall. Here Gates mixes his work with pieces he curated from friends and mentors in Japan—Taira Kuroki, Yuichi Hirano, Shion Tabata and Koichi Ohara among them—creating a conversation between makers who occupy different lineages of practice. A pale green niche interrupts the shelves to exhibit Prada Home tableware, bringing the retail brand into direct proximity with handmade objects.

Gates also designed many of the physical surfaces in the room. He collaborated with Mizuno Seitoen Lab to develop ceramic floor tiles and chose a raw, earthen plaster for the walls that is flecked with Japanese straw. The long table down the centre, reclaimed from wood, echoes one in Gates’s Chicago studio and cues an invitation to gather. Small sculptural forms punctuate the room—one circular crackle‑glazed piece hovers near a vintage turntable, a visual nod to the warm grain of vinyl and the textures of clay.

These decisions turn display into domestic scene, transforming a storefront into a shrine for objects that bridge use and ritual.

Chawan, Yunomi and Tokkuri: Objects That Carry Practice

At the heart of the installation is a small vocabulary of forms central to Japanese material culture. The chawan—the tea bowl—is the most visible actor. Traditionally used in tea ceremonies, chawans are held, warmed and turned; they reward touch and close attention. Yunomi, taller tea cups for everyday drinking, and guinomi, small sake cups, occupy adjacent roles in daily rituals. Tokkuri—sake bottles—punctuate shelves and tables. Together, these objects structure a domestic choreography: pour, lift, turn, sip, set down.

Gates’s chawan project sits on two registers. It pays homage to the functional history of the tea bowl as an object of ritual while also interrogating how repetition and variation produce meaning. Making a thousand iterations of a bowl is not a fetishization of quantity; it is an experiment in the threshold where form becomes meaningful through recurrence and small differences. When dozens of Gates’s bowls sit on shelves, the viewer registers rhythm rather than perfection. The line between mass and handcraft blurs, prompting questions about labor, presence and the visible traces left by making.

The source objects from Japanese ceramicists add another layer. They are not props. Each brings different glazes, firing techniques and sensibilities. In dialogue with Gates’s pieces, they map a constellation of making—some rooted in folk traditions, others in contemporary experimentation. The result destabilizes any single definition of authenticity, showing craft as a conversation across borders, generations and aesthetic priorities.

The decision to host tea ceremonies in a small courtyard behind the space further anchors the vessels in lived practice. A decontextualized bowl can be admired; a bowl used in ceremony returns to its primary function, filling the room with steam, gesture and communal attention.

Afro‑Mingei: Reworking Mingei for a Black Aesthetic Practice

Gates describes part of his work under the rubric of “Afro‑Mingei”—a deliberate collision between Japanese mingei, broadly translated as folk craft or crafts of the people, and aesthetics shaped by Black life and histories. Mingei, an early 20th‑century movement propagated by figures like Yanagi Sōetsu, Kanjiro Kawai and Shoji Hamada, elevated ordinary objects—tea bowls, workaday ceramics, utilitarian textiles—arguing that beauty could be found in anonymous, functional making. Gates takes aspects of that argument and inflects them through his experiences as an African American maker, urban planner and cultural organizer.

Afro‑Mingei reframes the makers, settings and social values that determine what counts as craft and who gets to preserve it. Gates’s approach emphasizes community use, repair, and the life of objects in everyday social contexts—the same values mingei celebrated but repositioned within histories of Black labor, migration and survival. His tiles, bags fashioned from clay, and the apothecary cabinet filled with bowls are not simply aesthetic gestures. They assert that objects made by Black hands—whether for ritual or for work—carry histories and forms of knowledge equally worthy of preservation and display.

Gates has consistently blurred art, craft, architecture and social practice. His Chicago projects transformed abandoned buildings into studios and cultural centers. The material focus of Chawan Cabinet connects those urban interventions with a quieter, more intimate side of practice: the daily rituals that stitch neighborhoods together, the kitchens and tables where connection happens.

Afro‑Mingei is not a claim of cultural synthesis without friction. Instead, it recognizes both continuity and difference—respecting Japanese techniques, acknowledging their historical contexts, and proposing new juxtapositions where Black aesthetics inform how objects are used and conceptualized.

Surface, Glaze and Kiln: The Technical Conversations

Ceramics is a conversation between material, heat and technique. Gates’s 1,000 tea bowl project foregrounds that conversation. Glazes behave unpredictably; kiln atmospheres shift; clay bodies respond to firing schedules. Gates uses these variables to surface traces rather than to efface them. Crackle glazes, ash accumulations, drips and uneven fields of color become indexes of process.

The collaboration with Mizuno Seitoen Lab for floor tiles extends this material conversation to architecture. Tile is a ceramic translated to a larger plane. The tiles underfoot ground the exhibition in a particular sensibility: they are not polished, factory‑perfect specimens but textured, hand‑informed planes that connect bodies to the work at a physical level. Walking across them creates a subtle feedback loop between movement and material.

The straw‑flecked earthen plaster on the walls recalls traditional wattle or adobe techniques in which organic fibers increase cohesion. The plaster’s roughness resists the smooth neutrality of typical gallery walls. It absorbs light differently, creating a softer, more intimate environment where shadows and fingerprints matter.

Combined, these surfaces stage a tactile environment that insists on bodily presence. Ceramics here is both object and atmosphere.

Sound, Furniture and the Domestic Scene

Sound is part of Gates’s curation. A vintage turntable sits beside a crackle‑glazed wall sculpture, a gesture that connects auditory grain to visual texture. Vinyl’s warm hiss and the patina of a used record mirror the imperfect, analog qualities of hand‑thrown clay. This cross‑sensory coupling enlarges the exhibition’s sense of time: objects accumulate wear, sound registers memory, and both invite closeness.

The reclaimed wood table down the centre of the space performs several roles. It references Gates’s Chicago studio and stages gatherings. Long tables are ritual anchors: places where food is served, tea is poured, and conversation unfolds. By repeating an element from his studio, Gates transports a fragment of his practice to Milan, creating an experiential continuity between his daily making and a public presentation.

Sculptural objects placed sparingly around the room provide visual pauses. The placement is calculated; it prevents sensory overload and amplifies each piece’s presence. The apothecary cabinet, dense with bowls and objects, offers concentrated detail, while isolated sculptures function like punctuation marks, moments of calm that reset the viewer’s attention.

The overall scene reads as a reenactment of domestic life elevated to contemplative scale—an invitation to move slowly and to notice.

Prada, Retail and the Politics of Space

Prada hosting Chawan Cabinet inside a Prada Home retail space raises important questions about the relationship between commerce and art. High fashion’s investments in culture are not new, but Gates’s project complicates the formula by introducing objects whose value is not tied to brand logos or runway spectacle. His bowl project foregrounds craft labor and repetition over exclusivity.

Prada has collaborated with Gates before. He participated in the Dorchester Industries Experimental Design Lab, an incubator program that supported Black designers and ran for three years. Such partnerships reflect a strategy that moves beyond marketing gestures into longer‑term investments in production and talent. For Gates, the relationship produces opportunities to imagine different institutional forms for his practice. “Prada has allowed me to fully push my interest in domestic objects, retail strategies, branding campaigns and the ongoing creation of space to build what feels like the beginning of something very special,” he said.

That statement frames Chawan Cabinet as an experiment in institutional choreography—what happens when a global luxury brand lends its real estate and resources to a project that centers craft and community. The result complicates assumptions about where art belongs. A storefront can be a gallery, a lab or a domestic stage. The sponsorship carries risks: potential dilution of critical edge, or accusations of commodification. The installation resists simple readings by insisting that objects, rituals and relationships are not simply marketable commodities but social tools. Whether the public perceives it that way depends on the programming, accessibility and the degree to which Gates’s curatorial voice remains central.

Prada benefits from the cultural capital of aligning with a major contemporary artist and a project rooted in craft and social practice. Gates benefits from Prada’s platform and resources. The alignment raises a broader question for contemporary institutions: can corporate spaces meaningfully host socially engaged art without neutralizing it? Chawan Cabinet suggests an affirmative possibility—provided the project keeps making room for community rituals and the maker’s priorities.

Makers on View: Japanese Ceramicists and Cross‑Cultural Exchange

Gates invited several Japanese ceramicists to be part of the exhibition: Taira Kuroki, Yuichi Hirano, Shion Tabata and Koichi Ohara. Each name denotes a living practice within Japan’s active contemporary ceramics scene. By placing these artists’ objects alongside his own, Gates stages a non‑hierarchical exchange. The arrangement resists the colonial trope of Western authority curating non‑Western crafts; instead, it creates mutuality through selection, acknowledgement and proximity.

This curatorial stance matters. Exhibitions that place non‑Western craft in a Western institution without context often exoticize or flatten distinct lineages. Gates sidesteps that by foregrounding relationships: the objects are not trophies but collaborators in a shared environment. The small courtyard for tea ceremonies adds another layer. When Japanese tea culture is performed in the same space as Gates’s bowls, it becomes less a borrowed ritual than a living practice enacted among makers and guests—an encounter that respects origins while permitting new permutations.

Cross‑cultural exchange carries responsibilities. It demands attention to history, not appropriation stripped of its roots. Gates’s earlier residence in Japan and ongoing relationships with Japanese makers provide a degree of embeddedness that changes the tenor of the exchange.

Public Programming and the Social Life of Objects

Chawan Cabinet is not only display. The courtyard hosted traditional Japanese tea ceremonies, bringing performance and communal ritual into the work’s orbit. Ceramics used in ritual reclaim their social functions: they are not inert art objects but active participants in the enactment of hospitality and attention.

Gates’s practice has always emphasized public programming. In Chicago, the Rebuild Foundation and Dorchester Projects turned abandoned spaces into studios, performance sites and social infrastructure. Those projects teach a lesson that returns in Milan: objects and spaces are civic when they are used. Ceramics in a vitrined, hermetic environment might be admired for aesthetics, but when they are passed between hands in ceremony, they revive relational logics that underpin both craft and community.

Programs like tea ceremonies also create opportunities for dialogue across cultural lines. They allow visitors to witness technique, learn gestures and see how objects function in context. For an audience that might know Prada for luxury goods, the ceremonies reframe the brand’s space as a locus for careful attention and cross‑cultural encounter.

How these programs operate after the design week moment will shape the project’s legacy. Short‑lived activations make potent statements, but sustained programming—workshops, exchanges, and public talks—integrates craft into daily cultural life in more durable ways.

Material Stories: Clay Handbags, Reclaimed Wood and Objects of Use

Not all works in Chawan Cabinet are bowls. Gates exhibits hefty clay handbags, sculptural pieces and domestic objects that complicate expectations. A clay handbag reads like a paradox: a vessel conceived for carrying, here rendered in material that is brittle compared with leather or fabric. The choice invites reflection on the symbolic weight of objects: what does it mean to carry lineage, history, identity or ritual across contexts? In Gates’s hand, the handbag becomes a sculptural provocation and a metaphor for burdens and belongings.

Reclaimed wood furniture—especially the long table—speaks to Gates’s long practice of reusing salvaged materials. Reclamation is not merely ecological. It is historical: wood that once served in a house or a shop carries traces of previous lives. Incorporating such pieces alongside freshly made ceramics creates an archive of reuse, an argument that aesthetics and sustainability need not be separate.

These material stories accumulate into an ethic: durability, touchability and memory matter. Gates structures the exhibition so that objects’ narratives intersect rather than sit separately. Visitors move from the apothecary cabinet’s dense archive of bowls to open spaces with single sculptures, encountering a range of object biographies.

Gates in Context: Past Projects and Ongoing Ambitions

Chawan Cabinet sits within a broader arc of Gates’s career. He has repeatedly worked at architectural scale and in civic projects. The 2022 Serpentine Pavilion in London harnessed brick, found materials and community labor to build a temporary architecture that engaged local histories. In Liverpool, Gates is collaborating with Asif Khan on a plan to transform the docks, a large‑scale effort that extends his interest in infrastructure and community regeneration.

The Dorchester Industries Experimental Design Lab with Prada reflects another axis of his work: platform building. The lab sought to incubate Black designers, providing resources and visibility. That effort aligns with the ethos of Afro‑Mingei: honoring craft, distributing resources and creating institutional footholds for makers whose work historically gets sidelined.

Chawan Cabinet distills these strands into an intimate field of objects. It does not abandon urban-scale thinking; rather, it tests how ritual, craft and retail can be remixed to host cultural conversations in unexpected places. The exhibition also models a practice for artists who want to preserve autonomy while leveraging corporate resources—a balancing act that requires clear curatorial intentions and sustained community commitments.

Cultural Sensibilities: Wabi‑Sabi, Imperfection and New Values

The chawan is often discussed through wabi‑sabi: an aesthetic that values imperfection, transience and the beauty of the unfinished. Gates’s bowls channel that sensibility but alter its cultural coordinates. Wabi‑sabi has origins in Japanese aesthetic philosophy, famously canonized through tea ceremony teachings and figures like Sen no Rikyū. Its concerns—simplicity, humility, and the acceptance of the incomplete—map naturally onto Gates’s attention to the traces of hands and the politics of use.

However, Afro‑Mingei reinterprets those values through different experiences of time and labor. For people whose histories include interruption, migration and systemic marginalization, imperfection can bear different social freight: it can be the visible artifact of resilience and improvisation rather than cultivated restraint. Gates’s work shows how aesthetic categories can travel and transform without being flattened. The chawan becomes a place where multiple understandings of imperfection, value and care sit in conversation.

This interplay raises critical questions for museums, collectors and markets. How do we value objects that resist perfection? How do institutions avoid exoticizing another culture’s aesthetics while also recognizing the labor and lineage behind those forms? Chawan Cabinet suggests answers that combine reciprocity with careful curation.

Reading the Room: Visitor Experience and Interpretive Possibilities

Walking through Chawan Cabinet is an invitation to slow observation. The exhibition is not a spectacle of wealth; it is a carefully composed environment that rewards touch in imagination if not always in practice. The apothecary cabinet’s density encourages close inspection; the modular shelves set up comparative readings; the long table suggests communal use. The turntable and crackle‑glazed sculpture remind visitors that sound and sight cohabit the same sensory field.

Interpretive signage matters here. Contextual notes about makers, techniques and Gates’s relationships would deepen visitors’ understanding without overbearing explanation. Short filmed testimonials from the Japanese ceramicists or a note about the Mizuno Seitoen Lab collaboration would clarify the show’s rootedness in dialogues rather than appropriation.

Given Prada’s real estate, the project is visible to a diverse parade: local makers, visitors drawn by Milan Design Week and passersby on a luxury shopping street. The audience mix introduces an interpretive variable. Some visitors will read the exhibition through a fashion lens; others will see a study in craft. The multiplicity of readings reflects the project’s hybrid nature.

The Market Question: Saleability, Accessibility and Collecting

The article source does not specify whether works in Chawan Cabinet are for sale. That ambiguity is illustrative. When craft moves into a retail space, the line between exhibition and commodity blurs. Selling individual bowls or small installations could extend Gates’s practice into livelihood for makers and increase accessibility to objects. Yet placing price tags on ritual objects raises ethical questions: when does commodification eclipse cultural function?

Gates’s history suggests sensitivity to these tensions. His projects have emphasized community ownership, skills transmission and collective benefit. If works are sold, the terms—how proceeds support makers, whether editions exist, and how provenance is documented—will influence whether the market amplifies or undermines the project’s cultural aims.

Collecting contemporary ceramics remains a growing field. Museums and private collectors who value craft’s social narratives could find Chawan Cabinet’s pieces appealing not only for formal qualities but for their context. The presence of works by Japanese makers and collaboration with Prada also situates the project within an art‑market circuit that prizes curated crossovers.

What Chawan Cabinet Signals for Craft, Fashion and Institutional Practice

Chawan Cabinet advances a model in which fashion, art and craft intersect without one subsuming the others. Prada provides the platform. Gates supplies the curatorial sensibility and social practice. Japan’s makers lend lineage. The installation points to several shifts.

First, it demonstrates how retail spaces can be repurposed for meaningful cultural programming that honors making rather than simply selling luxury. Second, it shows that contemporary craft practices—especially ceramics—remain potent vehicles for social philosophy. Third, it reframes narratives of cultural exchange: rather than being a one‑way appropriation, Chawan Cabinet stages collaborative conversations sustained by relationships and shared practice.

For other brands and institutions, the project offers a prototype: long­er collaborations that embed makers and communities, rather than single campaigns, produce deeper cultural dividends. For artists, it suggests pathways to expand practice via institutional resources while retaining curatorial control.

The risks remain real. Corporate sponsorship can smooth over political frictions, and short‑term activations can leave communities without sustained benefit. Gates’s credibility and prior work mitigate some concerns, but the long‑term success of such experiments depends on continued programming, transparent distribution of resources and a commitment to local makers.

Real‑World Parallels and Comparisons

Several contemporaneous practices help locate Chawan Cabinet within a broader field. El Anatsui, a Ghanaian sculptor, transforms found materials into monumental tapestries; his work interrogates material histories and trade routes while revaluing labor and discarded material. Like Gates, Anatsui reframes humble materials into monumental statements that complicate narratives of global craft.

Japanese contemporary ceramics have seen many crossovers with global design and fashion. Major museums have hosted surveys that position Japanese folk ceramics alongside modern art, bringing attention to makers who operate outside elite galleries. In retail, brands like Hermès and Louis Vuitton have incorporated craft collaborations that aim to elevate traditional techniques. The crucial difference in Gates’s case is the explicit social practice dimension: reclamation, community building and critique of institutional inequities.

Design festivals and biennials increasingly stage similar experiments. The Oslo architecture scene and Triennale events, for example, have placed community projects within institutional platforms. Chawan Cabinet belongs to that current: it is an effort to reassign value to everyday making and to make institutional spaces more porous.

Questions of Authorship and Curatorship

When an artist curates peers’ work inside a branded space, authorship becomes layered. Gates is maker, curator and organizer simultaneously. His curatorial choices are partly aesthetic and partly political. Selecting Japanese makers and situating them adjacent to Prada Home objects suggests intentional dialogue rather than hierarchy. The antique apothecary cabinet—Gates’s personal object—anchors the exhibition in his biography, reminding viewers that curatorial acts entangle personal histories with professional platforms.

Such layered authorship raises interpretive questions. Does the presence of Prada Home objects diminish the handmade pieces, or does it expand their legibility through contrast? How does curator‑as‑artist manage power dynamics with the makers represented? Gates’s relationships and the exhibition’s programming—tea ceremonies, makers’ presence, collaborative tile production—point toward collaborative rather than extractive practice. Those choices matter in reading the exhibition’s ethics.

Looking Ahead: Legacy and Potential Futures

Chawan Cabinet will be read in different registers: as a momentary design‑week highlight, as a model for retail‑art collaborations, and as a node in Gates’s ongoing project to place craft within civic practice. Its lasting influence will depend on what happens after the exhibition closes. If the partnerships—between Gates, Prada, Mizuno Seitoen Lab and Japanese makers—produce continued exchanges, workshops and public programming, then the project may seed longer‑term institutional change.

The exhibition also seeds conversations for museums and collectors about how to steward works that are meant to be used. Should institutions hold chai bowls in climate‑controlled cases, or should they allow use by communities? New curatorial models may be needed—ones that prioritize maker communities and ritual access.

Finally, the vernacular Gates promotes—Afro‑Mingei—invites artists and makers to imagine other hybrid genealogies of craft. Those genealogies resist purity and emphasize relational knowledge, offering a productive lens for rethinking craft’s role in contemporary art and urban practice.

FAQ

• Where is Chawan Cabinet located?
  • The exhibition occupies a Prada Home space next to the Prada store on Via Montenapoleone 6 in Milan’s historic centre.
• What is the focus of the exhibition?
  • Chawan Cabinet centers the chawan (tea bowl) alongside other tea and sake vessels, featuring Theaster Gates’s work—including pieces from his 1,000 tea bowl project—and a curated selection of Japanese ceramicists. The installation includes custom tiles, earthen plaster walls, reclaimed furniture and programming such as tea ceremonies.
• What is the 1,000 tea bowl project?
  • Gates’s project involves making large numbers of tea bowls to explore replication, subtle variation and glaze experimentation. The project examines how repetition and small differences create meaning and how everyday objects can carry ritual significance.
• Who are the Japanese makers included?
  • The exhibition includes selections from Taira Kuroki, Yuichi Hirano, Shion Tabata and Koichi Ohara, among others, reflecting a range of contemporary Japanese ceramic practices.
• What does “Afro‑Mingei” mean?
  • Afro‑Mingei is Gates’s term for combining elements of Japanese mingei—valuing anonymous, functional folk craft—with aesthetics and social practices rooted in Black life. It emphasizes craft made for use, community care and the visibility of Black makers’ traditions.
• Did Gates design the physical space?
  • Yes. Gates designed many elements of the space, including shipping his antique apothecary cabinet from Chicago, commissioning ceramic floor tiles with Mizuno Seitoen Lab, selecting earthen plaster for the walls, placing a reclaimed wood table, and curating sound via a vintage turntable.
• Are the ceramics for sale?
  • The source material does not specify sales information. For details on acquisition or availability, contact Prada Home or the exhibition organizers directly.
• How does this project relate to Gates’s other work?
  • Chawan Cabinet connects to Gates’s broader practice of combining material making, community projects and institutional collaborations. Past projects include the Dorchester Industries Experimental Design Lab, the 2022 Serpentine Pavilion, and urban regeneration work such as the Liverpool docks collaboration with Asif Khan.
• Does the exhibition stage live programs?
  • Yes. The setup included a small courtyard for traditional Japanese tea ceremonies, integrating performance and ritual into the exhibition’s programming.
• What broader implications does Chawan Cabinet have for cultural institutions?
  • The project models a way brands and institutions can host craft‑based, community‑oriented projects that prioritize maker relationships and ritual use. Its success will be measured by continued programming, equitable partnerships and the degree to which it sustains benefits for makers and communities beyond a single event.