Prada at Prada Rong Zhai — Prada Mode Shanghai: Mian by Jia Zhangke (2020)

Prada Rong Zhai, a restored historic residence in central Shanghai, hosted a two-day cultural club built around Jia Zhangke's site-specific work.

The venue

Prada Rong Zhai is a former private residence in central Shanghai, kept as a mansion of connected rooms rather than open halls. Its interiors retain domestic scale: parlours, corridors, staircases and smaller chambers that set a sequence of thresholds. The house is used by Prada as a cultural venue, with rooms adapted for exhibitions, screenings and talks while the residential proportions and decorative surfaces remain visible.

How the space was used

The house was given over to "MIAN", a site-specific work by Jia Zhangke in three chapters: noodle making and sharing, tattoo imagery on skin as surface, and meetings with public figures through new media. Rooms carried the chapters in sequence, and daily pairs of talks on architecture, contemporary thought, literature and film were staged alongside a 1990s-style disco programme.

Why it works here

Programmes that depend on intimacy, sequence and lingering rather than throughput suit a mansion of small rooms. Talks, meals and one-to-one encounters read as gatherings in a house, and the restored interiors give the commissioned work a domestic frame that a neutral hall could not provide.