Milan Report: Nendo’s Chair Installation Takes Over Historic Cloister

During the 2016 Milan Design Week, the colonnaded cloister of Basilica Minore di San Simpliciano, in the heart of the city’s Brera Design District, underwent a brilliant transformation courtesy of Japanese creative studio Nendo. The installation, titled 50 Manga Chairs, featured, as the name says, 50 different chairs lined up in a perfect grid filling the cloister space. But these were no ordinary chairs.

The installation sought to bring together two very different worlds: Japanese manga comics and furniture design. Thus, each chair featured different abstract line details reminiscent of graphic forms that represent an emotion, movement or interaction in manga illustration, from the “speech bubble” to “tears.”

Japanese designer Oki Sato, better known as Nendo, told us, “Manga are deeply rooted with the Japanese culture, and I started thinking, ‘Can we use the techniques used in manga for furniture and objects, its way of expressing feelings and emotions and movements?’”

When asked if there was a sequence to view and interpret a story, Sato replied, “I tried to make it as random as possible so that when people start looking at it, they can make their own story.”

Each piece was constructed from stainless steel with a polished mirrored finish to reflect the surrounding historical site as well as the blue of the sky, an effect that was amplified by a special backdrop: Nendo conceived a uniform base with a layer of small white pebbles and backed the four cloister colonnades in black coverings to make the 50 chairs visually pop in the center of the courtyard.

50 Manga Chairs was the European premiere of an installation designed for the Friedman Benda New York gallery, where it will be part of a solo exhibition from September 8 to October 15, 2016.