ART & CULTURE · LONDON
Reading time: 15 minEvery national pavilion at Somerset House this summer was asked to answer the same theme. One of them answered by asking whether the pavilion, as a format, still deserves to exist. That argument, staged by the Netherlands inside an exhibition about design, is the most design-literate thing London Design Biennale 2025 produced. Seven other pavilions answered the same brief in stone, hair, iron, a lost garden, porcelain and living bacteria.
London Design Biennale returned to Somerset House from 5 to 29 June 2025 for its fifth edition, with more than 35 national and regional pavilions filling the courtyard, the river terrace and the neoclassical rooms behind them. It is the same building the biennale has occupied since it began in 2016, and the pavilions this year ran from the Edmond J. Safra Fountain Court through to the Embankment Galleries and the Nelson Stair, meaning a visitor moves through William Chambers’s eighteenth-century state rooms and a live design argument in the same afternoon. Dr Samuel Ross MBE, the designer and founder of A-COLD-WALL* and SR_A, set the theme: Surface Reflections, an invitation for each participating country to look inward at its own history and outward at how that history is read by others.
Image © Netherlands, London Design Biennale 2025
Most pavilions took the brief literally, and produced work about identity, material and place. One pavilion took it further. The Netherlands, curated by Het Nieuwe Instituut under the artistic direction of Aric Chen, used its space not to represent the country but to interrogate the mechanism doing the representing: the national pavilion itself, and the biennale format that keeps producing it every two years. It is a strange thing to watch a country do inside an exhibition built on countries showing up. It is also, on inspection, the sharpest possible reading of what Ross was actually asking for. This piece profiles that pavilion alongside seven others that answered the same theme in markedly different material: Japan’s suspended paper, Malta’s medal-winning stone, Peru’s economics of hair, Nigeria’s ironworking, Uzbek Design’s rebuilt garden, China’s porcelain and a joint UK university team working in bacteria and mycelium.
All images © Oman, London Design Biennale 2025
What “Surface Reflections” was actually asking
Ross has described the 2025 theme as “an invitation to introspectively look at what we all have to offer with our unique allegories, context and histories,” while also functioning as “the connective tissue that we’re all here together.” It is a theme built to be interpreted rather than illustrated, and it rewards a curator willing to treat the invitation as a genuine question rather than a prompt for a mood board.
All images © Rachel Botsman, London Design Biennale 2025
Ross’s own path into the role matters here. Born in 1991, he built his reputation outside architecture and product design’s usual training routes: a first-class degree in graphic design and illustration from De Montfort University in Leicester, then a formative period from 2012 working as Virgil Abloh’s first design assistant. He founded the fashion and design house A-COLD-WALL* in 2014 and the architecture and strategic design practice SR_A in 2019, moving between fashion, furniture, product and increasingly buildings, and was appointed MBE in 2023 for services to design. His practices have since worked with Nike, LVMH, Kohler and William Grant & Sons, and in 2023 he became principal design consultant for Beats, Apple’s audio brand, applying the same brutalist, materials-led vocabulary he built in fashion to a mainstream consumer product. In 2020 he founded the Black British Artist Grants Programme, extending funding and institutional access to artists and designers of colour. A biennale artistic director who spent his own career moving between fashion houses, product studios and now a global technology brand, refusing to stay inside one discipline’s rules, was always likely to set a theme that asked pavilions to interrogate their own terms, rather than simply decorate them.
Most pavilions answered with craft, material and atmosphere, which is exactly what a design biennale is for. The eight profiled here answered with an argument.
All images © Melek Zeynep Bulut, London Design Biennale 2025
The pavilion that questioned the pavilion
The Dutch contribution, titled Remapping Collaborations Working Group, is not a showcase of Dutch design. It is the public output of a working group that Het Nieuwe Instituut initiated in 2023, the year the institute curated the entire London Design Biennale under the theme The Global Game: Remapping Collaborations. Rather than launch a new national narrative for 2025, the institute chose to return with a continuation, this time turned on the biennale format itself.
All images © Romania, London Design Biennale 2025
The pavilion’s premise is that national representation at a biennale is, in the institute’s own framing, an inherited 19th-century geopolitical model: pavilions organised by country, on a fixed cyclical rhythm, that persist less because they answer a present need than because they offer predictability and economic stability to the institutions that fund them. The working group warns against letting “collaboration” harden into “a buzzword, platformed, sanitised and instrumentalised,” and argues instead for events willing to sit with “disorientation,” choosing “opacity over spectacle and discomfort over polished narratives.”
All images © Northumbria University & UCL, London Design Biennale 2025
The material result is a publication gathering essays, reflections and transcribed conversations from a group of collaborators that includes Yin Aiwen, Ali T. As’ad, Nishat Awan, Anja Groten, Colin Keays and RESOLVE Collective, presented within Somerset House’s Film Studio rather than staged as a conventional national display. It is a pavilion that spends its allotted space asking whether it should exist in its current form at all, funded and hosted by the very structure it is questioning.
Image © Saudi Arabia, London Design Biennale 2025
That continuity is what makes it more than a provocative gesture. Aric Chen was appointed general and artistic director of Het Nieuwe Instituut in April 2021, two years before the institute took charge of the whole 2023 biennale, and he was still in post when the 2025 working group publication went to press. The same person oversaw both the year the institute curated an entire international exhibition and the year it used a single national pavilion to ask whether exhibitions like that one should keep working the way they do. Few pavilions at any biennale get to make an argument with that much institutional memory behind it, because few institutions get invited back twice with room to change their mind in public.
All images © Argentina, London Design Biennale 2025
The pavilion that answered with paper instead of argument
If the Dutch pavilion tested the theme conceptually, Japan’s tested it materially, and the contrast is instructive. Paper Clouds, the Japan pavilion, was designed by the architect Kengo Kuma with Toshiki Hirano, co-director of the Sekisui House-Kuma Lab research department that Kuma founded at the University of Tokyo in 2009, working with the London-based Clare Farrow Studio.
All images © Japan, London Design Biennale 2025
The installation suspends around 70 washi paper panels on gold thread around the Nelson Stair at Somerset House, referencing suyari-gasumi, the trailing bands of mist used in traditional Japanese painting to suggest depth and passage without drawing a hard line. The panels are not made by conventional papermaking. Hirano’s team developed a thick paste from kōzo plant fibre, trowelled it onto CNC-cut moulds and pressed it by hand into a lattice texture for structural stiffness, then peeled each panel away once dry as a shallow bowl shape: a technique built to get maximum strength from minimum weight, with the studio now testing outdoor coatings and 3D-printing applications for the same process. Kuma has framed the piece as a dialogue between East and West, pairing Japanese lightness against the classical solidity of Somerset House’s stone stairwell, and has spoken pointedly about clients who “only wish to repeat the previous design” as the instinct his own research work is built to resist.
All images © Chile, London Design Biennale 2025
Where the Dutch pavilion questioned the format from the inside, the Japan pavilion answered the same brief by proving, in a single staircase, that even a centuries-old material and a centuries-old motif still have somewhere new to go if the technique behind them is allowed to change. Both are readings of “Surface Reflections.” Neither is decoration.
All images © Chile, London Design Biennale 2025
Malta: a communal urn built from quarry waste
Malta’s pavilion, URNA, answered Surface Reflections with the most literal surface in the building: reconstituted limestone, cast into spheres and set out as a collective field. The Valletta architect Anthony Bonnici of Ebejer Bonnici led the design, working with the curator and architect Andrew Borg Wirth and the architects Tanil Raif and Thomas Mifsud, and the material itself carried an argument before anyone made one. Each sphere is cast from Recobel, a limestone reconstituted from quarry dust by the Maltese firm Halmann Vella, and each one embeds a portion of cremated human remains.
All images © Poland, London Design Biennale 2025
The pavilion responds directly to Malta’s recent legalisation of cremation, a change with no established ritual attached to it yet, on an island whose funerary culture has for millennia been built around stone. Borg Wirth has described the finished field of spheres as looking “like stars in a galaxy,” and the comparison does real work: rather than isolating a single act of remembrance, the installation turns cremation into something collective and cosmological, continuing a relationship with stone that predates Malta’s Neolithic temples rather than breaking from it. The biennale’s own jury agreed, awarding URNA the 2025 London Design Biennale Medal, the event’s top honour.
Image © Malta, London Design Biennale 2025
Peru: an economy built from hair, not a display of it
Peru’s pavilion, HÆIRLOOM, is less a display of finished objects than a working economic model. CHIQA, the social enterprise behind it, was founded by Kiara Kulisic on an idea originated by Leslie Osterling, and operates from Huayronccoyoc Pampa, a semirural community near Ollantaytambo in the Sacred Valley of Cusco. The pavilion, curated by Carlos Caamaño with exhibition design by Maya Ballen, presents wigs handcrafted from human hair by Andean women using the same textile skills their communities have practised for generations, redirected here from cloth to hair and sold into a market that did not previously exist for them.
All images © VCUarts Qatar, London Design Biennale 2025
The project’s argument is about authorship as much as material. CHIQA’s own framing is direct: “By harnessing the potential of their own hair, these women are challenging cultural norms and forging a path towards financial independence.” That is a different brief to most of what a biennale usually shows, since the object really on display is the economic structure built around a group of named, credited women rather than an anonymous supply chain, a distinction the textile artist Carolina Estrada and the documentary maker Romina Osterling, whose 2023 film Some Hairs Never Fall follows the same community, both help make visible.
All images © Peru, London Design Biennale 2025
Nigeria: a first government pavilion built from an ancient furnace, not a monument
Nigeria’s presence at Somerset House, Hopes and Impediments, was the country’s first government-backed pavilion at the biennale, curated by the Nigerian-American designer and researcher Myles Igwebuike. Its title borrows from Chinua Achebe’s essay collection of the same name, and Igwebuike has been explicit that the reference is a deliberate act of reframing rather than decoration: he treats heritage, in his own words, as functioning “less as a monument and more as material, something to be worked with, challenged and reimagined.”
All images © The Global South, London Design Biennale 2025
The pavilion’s design vocabulary comes from Lejja, an ancient iron-smelting site in south-eastern Nigeria that predates many better-known metallurgical traditions elsewhere in the world. Rather than illustrate that history, Igwebuike uses it as a working method, reading the ritual, craft and spatial organisation encoded in indigenous knowledge systems and translating them into design as an act of excavation. The approach earned the pavilion a Special Mention from the biennale’s jury, and its underlying argument, that heritage supplies foundations for new design rather than a fixed style to preserve, is one none of Somerset House’s more literally decorative pavilions this year attempted.
All images © Nigeria, London Design Biennale 2025
Uzbek Design: a lost Timurid garden, rebuilt as an octagon
Uzbek Design’s pavilion, The Once and Future Garden, made its country’s biennale debut by rebuilding something that no longer exists: the chahar-bagh gardens of Timurid Samarkand, reconstructed as an octagonal room in pale green, its transparent textile windows cut into the pointed mihrab shapes usually reserved for architecture rather than fabric. Curated by Phoebe Tronzo with Alsu Akhmetzyanova as assistant curator, the pavilion assembled four practitioners rather than a single designer: Nigora Hashimova reworking traditional ikat weaving into contemporary fashion, the furniture designers Tigran Erdman and Timur Parvanov building aged bekasam textiles into new furniture forms, the embroiderer Madina Kasimbaeva working in hand-dyed silk suzani sourced from Margilan, and the UK-based glass artist Ruth Shelley, whose vessels translate the patterns of Khiva carpets into blown glass.
Image © Turkey, London Design Biennale 2025
Akhmetzyanova has summarised the pavilion’s purpose plainly: “Uzbek design today is thoughtful, bold, and alive, and it deserves to be part of the global conversation.” The garden setting is doing more than providing atmosphere. A chahar-bagh is itself a design argument, a garden quartered by water channels to represent paradise, and rebuilding one as a room of contemporary craft objects makes the same case Nigeria’s pavilion makes from iron rather than water: that a historical form can hold new work without simply decorating it.
All images © Uzbek Design, London Design Biennale 2025
China: porcelain read as cultural DNA
China’s pavilion, presented under the title China Genome: Surface Reflections of Cultural DNA, came from Jingdezhen Ceramic University, the institution at the centre of thirteen centuries of Chinese porcelain production, led by its chief curator Lyu Pinchang and executive curator Yu Jianfeng, with Yin Peng directing the exhibition. Nineteen designers and faculty members contributed work, among them Juan Lu, Changzong Shao, Jiawen Li and Zhou Long, ranging from AI-generated glazes and three-dimensional printed forms through to vessels thrown entirely by hand.
Image © Turkey, London Design Biennale 2025
The pavilion’s own framing gets closer to Surface Reflections than almost anything else in the building: “Porcelain is more than clay and fire, it is a surface where civilisations reflect themselves.” That is a literal reading of the theme rather than a metaphorical one, and it is also a preview: Jingdezhen will host its own International Ceramic Biennale in 2026, and this pavilion functions as advance notice that the city intends to argue for glaze and form as technology rather than only as heritage craft.
All images © China, London Design Biennale 2025
Northumbria University and UCL: buildings grown rather than built
The most technically ambitious pavilion at Somerset House this year made no claim to represent a country at all. Living Assembly, led by Richard Beckett at UCL’s Bartlett Faculty and Martyn Dade-Robertson at Northumbria University’s Hub for Biotechnology in the Built Environment, set out mycelium-based bulk materials, microbially engineered self-pigmenting leathers, bacterial cement cast in experimental moulds, and a bacteria-based latex that responds to humidity, alongside ceramics embedded with living, beneficial bacteria.
The two universities’ teams, drawing on researchers and students including Aileen Hoenerloh, Meng Zhang and Thora Arnardottir, alongside partners at CRESCO Biotech, Cornell University and Newcastle University’s APL Workshop, describe the goal as a future in which the built environment is grown rather than constructed, and are explicit that the ambition is to move past biomorphic decoration rather than repeat it. Set against Japan’s washi paper panels a few rooms away, both pavilions made the same underlying case in different disciplines: that a genuinely new material, whether grown from bacteria or pressed by hand from plant fibre, is worth more attention than a new shape built from an old one.
All images © Argentina, London Design Biennale 2025
A theme is only as good as what a pavilion does with it
London Design Biennale has set a distinct theme for every edition since it began at Somerset House in 2016: Utopia by Design that year, Emotional States in 2018, Resonance in the delayed 2021 edition, and The Global Game: Remapping Collaborations in 2023, the theme Het Nieuwe Instituut itself set as curator of the whole event before returning in 2025 to interrogate it from inside a single pavilion. Every edition asks each participating country to interpret the same word or phrase through its own design culture, which is what makes the biennale format function as a genuine comparison rather than a trade fair: the constraint is shared, and what varies is entirely the response.
Image © Portugal, London Design Biennale 2025
Judged against that five-edition pattern, 2025’s most valuable pavilions were not necessarily the most photogenic. They were the ones that treated the theme as an argument to be tested rather than a brief to be styled around: turning a national platform into a piece of institutional self-criticism, as the Netherlands did; using new fabrication research to make an old material behave in a way it never has before, as Japan did under Kuma and Hirano; or reading a country’s own deep history, in stone, iron, hair or a garden, as something to work with rather than something to display, as Malta, Nigeria, Peru and Uzbek Design each did in their own material.
Read together, the eight pavilions profiled here show how differently a shared theme can be answered without any answer being the wrong one. The Netherlands worked in text, argument and publication. Japan worked in suspended paper. Living Assembly worked in bacteria and mycelium, arguing that Surface Reflections could be read literally, as the surface of a living material, rather than as a metaphor. Malta, Nigeria, Peru and Uzbek Design each took a specific inherited practice, a cremation ritual, an ironworking tradition, a textile skill, a garden form, and asked what it looks like read forward rather than preserved. A theme strong enough to hold all of that, and to make each reading legible against the others, is doing its job. That is a harder thing for an artistic director to engineer than a striking headline installation, and it is the part of Ross’s brief for 2025 that this year’s pavilions ended up proving collectively rather than individually.
All images © Abu Dhabi, London Design Biennale 2025
Final thoughts
A biennale succeeds or fails on whether its theme survives contact with more than 35 different design cultures interpreting it at once. Surface Reflections survived contact this year because pavilions across the building refused to treat it as decoration: the Netherlands used it to ask whether the very structure hosting the question still deserves to exist, Japan used it to prove that a material as old as washi paper has not finished changing, and Malta, Nigeria, Peru, Uzbek Design and the Northumbria and UCL team each used it to argue that a specific inherited practice, a stone, a furnace, a thread, a garden, a living material, still has somewhere new to go. Somerset House will set another theme in 2027. On this showing, the pavilions worth returning for will be the ones willing to argue with it.
What was the theme of London Design Biennale 2025?
Surface Reflections, set by artistic director Dr Samuel Ross MBE, inviting national and regional pavilions to explore how personal and collective histories are shaped by both internal experience and external perception.
Where and when did it take place?
At Somerset House in London, from 5 to 29 June 2025, with more than 35 pavilions across the building’s courtyard, river terrace and interior rooms.
What was the Netherlands pavilion about?
Titled Remapping Collaborations Working Group, it was curated by Het Nieuwe Instituut under artistic director Aric Chen, continuing a working group the institute started in 2023, when it curated the entire biennale. The pavilion argues that the national-pavilion model itself is an outdated structure worth questioning, presented as a publication of essays and transcribed discussions rather than a conventional design showcase.
What was the Japan pavilion?
Paper Clouds, designed by Kengo Kuma with Toshiki Hirano of the Sekisui House-Kuma Lab and London’s Clare Farrow Studio: roughly 70 washi panels made from a hand-pressed kōzo fibre paste on CNC-cut moulds, suspended on gold thread around the Nelson Stair.
Which pavilion won the London Design Biennale Medal in 2025?
Malta, for URNA, a field of cast limestone spheres by Anthony Bonnici, Andrew Borg Wirth, Tanil Raif and Thomas Mifsud, each embedding cremated human remains in response to Malta’s recent legalisation of cremation.
What other pavilions stood out in 2025?
Peru’s HÆIRLOOM turned Andean hair-weaving skill into a wig-making enterprise for women in the Sacred Valley of Cusco; Nigeria’s Hopes and Impediments drew on the ancient Lejja iron-smelting site for the country’s first government-backed pavilion; Uzbek Design’s The Once and Future Garden rebuilt a lost Timurid garden from Samarkand; China’s Jingdezhen Ceramic University showed AI-glazed and hand-thrown porcelain; and a joint Northumbria University and UCL team presented Living Assembly, built from mycelium, bacteria-grown leather and bacterial cement.
Who is Samuel Ross?
A British designer and founder of the fashion and design house A-COLD-WALL* (2014) and the architecture and strategic design practice SR_A (2019). He began his career in 2012 as Virgil Abloh’s first design assistant, was appointed MBE in 2023, and founded the Black British Artist Grants Programme in 2020.
Is London Design Biennale an annual event?
No. As the name states, it runs every two years, with editions in 2016, 2018, 2021 (delayed from 2020), 2023 and 2025, each built around a distinct theme.
Event London Design Biennale 2025 · Venue Somerset House, London · Artistic Director Dr Samuel Ross MBE · Dates 5 to 29 June 2025
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