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Milan Design Week / Through A Japanese Eye

Japanese material memory, Milan as witness.

Anchored by the legendary Salone del Mobile, once a year Milan collapses into a design based cultural network where hidden courtyards, abandoned factories and domestic spaces turn into exhibitions. We moved through it looking for the pieces that pull you in without explaining why. Most of them, without us planning it, carried the same origin. Japan kept finding us.

It starts at CUBO Unipol, with the Inhabit the Blackness exhibit: an all- black, centered composition of Japanese fashion surrounding an Italian artwork. Introducing one culture into another inevitably creates dialogue. And here, Japan frames the conversation. In curatorial practice, the most compelling moments happen when different voices coexist: at the center stands Alberto Burri, Italian, surrounded by five works from Yohji Yamamoto, Issey Miyake, and Junya Watanabe. Burri’s work is rooted in textiles, seams, stitches. You see fragments of fabric, lace. A sensuality that doesn’t rely on the body being exposed. It’s not a coincidence that the garments surrounding it are for women, yet designed by men. The gaze becomes a point of tension. Italian sensuality reads as more physical, more direct. The Japanese approach is more distant, more constructed and yet, deeply sensual. Before Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo, in Japan black was never about fashion or empowerment. It signified mourning and humility. Within this exhibition there’s a shift in the seductive norm: what was once reserved and restrictive becomes the very language of attraction.

Salone itself is paradoxical. For outsiders, it represents history, democratization, and access. A gateway into design at its highest level. For locals, it can feel detached, overproduced, almost too institutional. But within that tension, it offers something rare: the possibility of encountering museum-level pieces in a live context. How High the Moon becomes exactly that moment. Shiro Kuramata (Japanese) worked with entirely Western materials: metal mesh, plexiglass; and yet what he produced was unmistakably Japanese. The chair is almost immaterial. Light to the point of disappearance. From afar, it reads as a conventional chair. Up close, its structure dissolves, without solid mass or any expected construction logic. It challenges the idea of what a chair is, or whether it even needs to fully function as one. There’s a sensitivity to air and to space. The metal reflects, almost destabilizing its own presence. It feels fragile, even though it’s not. It exists in constant negotiation with its environment. This is deeply rooted in Japanese thinking, where objects are not inert, but carry presence, even soul. A quiet animism, where material, space and intention are inseparable.

“It challenges the idea of what a chair is, or whether it even needs to fully function as one.”

How High The Moon

But what happens when the material itself carries a cultural heritage?
Japan is an island shaped by volcanic activity and earthquakes, a landscape in constant physical change. That instability carries into a way of thinking where nothing is fixed, and therefore, there’s no resistance to change. Traditional material techniques follow the same logic. Studio Ambre × Phasis Audio created an audio system whose surface looks carbonized but is actually sturdy. It’s made using the Yakisugi technique, where wood is burned for preservation. In this gesture, what should weaken the material instead protects it. And since each piece burns differently, every object becomes unique. Placed within a hi-fi system, the material introduces imperfection, destabilizing the expectation of technology as clean and optimized.

“Studio Ambre × Phasis Audio created an audio system whose surface looks carbonized but is actually sturdy.”

Studio Ambre

But Japanese tradition also carries control. Time is observed, repeated and refined, resulting in precision. In Zui Conn by Siin Siin Studio, this takes form through chainsaw carving. Using three different blades, the surface develops visible, irregular textures, where the furniture carries the gesture of its making. Finished with pine soot and persimmon tannin, a traditional treatment once used on samurai and merchant houses, the wood turns deep black while gaining protective qualities. It becomes a form of cultural traceability, where material, maker, and method remain fully visible in the final object.

It’s no surprise that Japan’s relationship to nature is starting to resonate globally. We’re in a moment where design is moving through a kind of clean-tech reset, trying to re-root itself. There’s a growing awareness that hyper-artificial systems have limits, and that material intelligence might come from older, slower, more sensitive processes. Italy holds the space for this exchange. A territory historically built on il bello, is now expanding into a system where nature and design host the dialogue between cultures. And the process becomes the message.

Zui Conn

Milan Design Week / Through A Japanese Eye

Credits:

Words: Luciana Maranca / @ultraniche.girl
Visual Editor: Carmela Giraudo / @carmelag________

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