They eventually collaborated on a project they called Satellites, which premiered at Herzog & de Meuron’s Prada Aoyama Tokyo in 2023, an installation that exists even though its creators cannot verbally communicate—Kojima doesn’t speak English, Refn doesn’t speak Japanese. They work in completely different media, film and video games. “Growing up in my situation in New York, Hideo in Tokyo, the idea of Satellites was: We were individual artists, individual people, individual fathers, that basically communicated without ever really talking to each other,” Refn said.
“We met in London, and met in many places, we even met in Saudi Arabia,” Kojima said, through an interpreter.
The three of us were sitting in a lounge at the Chelsea, all of it closed off to only those with Prada Mode silver guest cards—Prada had taken over the hotel, though there are still around 50 permanent tenants at the Chelsea, and they were invited too. At one point, Refn ordered a basket of bread, specifically rugbrød from the Copenhagen-based outfit Juno the Bakery. The rye masters had been flown in to bake in situ.
“We’ve gone all over the world,” Refn said.
And so what did they create for Prada Mode New York? There are the monitors in the lobby, retro-futuristic monitors that show both artists, and the pirate radio feed that plays on the TVs in the hotels. There are cassettes that were distributed to guests, along with cassette players complete with Prada-branded headphones. All of it was to allow the work’s sonic element to play on analog platforms.
“I have never stayed here at Hotel Chelsea before, but I had certainly heard of it. When we asked ourselves, ‘Where is the center of gravity in New York?’ We agreed that this hotel should be our base,” Kojima said. “When I was growing up in Japan, Tokyo was the first place everyone headed to if they were chasing success. Artists, musicians, actors, professors, you name it—everyone came to Tokyo. Once you’ve earned success in Tokyo, people would dream about going to the US. But not just anywhere in America: New York. New York was the place to go to be successful. It’s a place filled with opportunities. So, what better place to bring the Aoyama exhibition for an even bigger stage than New York City and the Hotel Chelsea?”
An important sticking point for the two artists was carte blanche to cook up whatever they wanted. That was not a problem.
“When we spoke with Mrs. Prada about Prada Mode, she didn’t specify any certain direction for us to take. Instead, she gave us complete creative freedom,” Kojima said. “She was very open about our ideas and basically said, ‘That sounds great; go for it!’”
“Because we actually have a contract. It said, ‘Good idea.’ And all of us signed it,” Refn said.
“Yes, we did that, we signed that,” Kojima said.
After all the colloquy, surely there was time for supper, for which Prada rented out Katz’s, the delicatessen on the Lower East Side that’s been slinging cured meat even longer than creative types have been washing up at the Chelsea. You know the lines: “I’ll have what she’s having,” “Send a salami to your boy in the army.” I spotted several Prada-clad stars moseying under the tin-clad ceiling, including Shailene Woodley, who once worked full-time at the now-defunct American Apparel store a block down Houston, on Orchard Street.
