SHANGHAI.- Prada presents the exhibition “A Kind of Language: Storyboards and Other Renderings for Cinema” with the support of Fondazione Prada. The project, curated by Melissa Harris, on view from 4 November 2025 to 1 February 2026 at Prada Rong Zhai, the historic 1918 residence in Shanghai restored by Prada and reopened in 2017.
Initially presented at Osservatorio Fondazione Prada in Milan from 30 January to 8 September 2025, “A Kind of Language” sheds light on the complex creative process behind filmmaking by exploring storyboards and other materials intrinsic to this process, such as mood boards, drawings and sketches, scrapbooks, notebooks, and photographs.
This second chapter of the exhibition in Shanghai aims to broadly explore various approaches to filmmaking, highlighting and deepening the research into Asian cinema, particularly Chinese productions from the past decades. The show will feature more than five hundred items created between 1940 and 2024 by over thirty authors, including film directors, cinematographers, visual artists, graphic designers, animators, choreographers such as: Muzaffar Ali, Pedro Almodóvar, Wes Anderson, Ingmar Bergman, Martin Campbell, Charlie Chaplin, Álex de la Iglesia, Jonathan Demme, Cecil B. DeMille, Fleischer Studios, Terry Gilliam, Frant Gwo, Todd Haynes, Alfred Hitchcock, Jia Zhang-ke, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Joan Jonas, Isaac Julien, John Irving, Yang Lina, Jia Ling, Hayao Miyazaki, Christopher Nolan, Qiu Jiongjiong, Satyajit Ray, Jerome Robbins, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Andrew Stanton and Lee Unkrich, Tan Chui Mui, Agnès Varda, Walt Disney Productions, Wim Wenders, Robert Wise, and Fred Zinnemann.
As stated by Melissa Harris, “For most of the medium’s history, the experience of a film has been relatively unchanged—democratic, universal, and finite. We sit expectantly, preparing to be transported. While of course we bring our own lives and expectations and biases to the moment, the movies themselves remain fundamentally fixed, and as such reveal minimal information as to their process of becoming. ‘A Kind of Language’ shares myriad approaches toward this early phase of movie-making that, while rarely made available to the public, is nonetheless crucial”.
Storyboards have a dual purpose as they embody the director’s creative vision as interpreted by the storyboard artist (when not the director), as well as addressing, at times, the technical realization of the film. Storyboards may be considered a language on its own, complementing and elaborating on a concept or script. They represent one of the first visualizations of a director’s idea and vision before the film is actually shot. They are a flexible and evolving tool for sharing a working outline that helps coordinate the activities of many professional figures on and off the set. These materials serve a pragmatic and communicative purpose in that they are meant to be circulated, copied, consulted, and modified and, thus, are rarely considered unique pieces. Storyboards play a crucial role in different stages of film creation: from pre-production, where they help visualize the director’s thoughts, to production, where they guide the filming process, and even in post-production, where they assist in editing and special effects.
The exhibition set design, conceived by Andrea Faraguna and developed with Sub, reinterprets the concept created for the Milan project to suit the unique architecture of the residence of Prada Rong Zhai. By focusing on the storyboard’s role in filmmaking, the installation recreates the working environment of storyboard artists, turning it into a spatial experience. At the heart of the design are tables inspired by classic drafting desks, each dedicated to a specific film, presenting its visual narrative as a sequence of scenes visitors can explore up close. Moving through the rooms of the historic residence, the arrangement of tables creates a dynamic flow, as if visitors were guided through the frames of a film. This experience encourages the audience to engage with the nature of storyboards, not merely as static images but as integral elements of cinematic narration.
