From Textiles to Totems: Nature and Animals Inspire Paris Art Week 2025 at Design Miami, Asia NOW, and Paris Internationale.
Paris Art Week 2025 unfurls across the city like an intricate tapestry woven from threads of art, design, craft, and imagination. From the gilded salons of Saint-Germain-des-Prés to the contemporary spaces along the Seine, three major fairs–Design Miami Paris, Asia NOW, and Paris Internationale–anchor this year’s cultural calendar. A unifying theme runs through them all: a reverence for nature, animals, and the tactile poetry of textiles.
This autumn, the conversation between the natural world and contemporary creativity is everywhere. At Design Miami Paris, animal forms take sculptural shape in metal and clay. At Asia NOW, textile artists reinterpret ancestral crafts as meditations on memory and healing. And at Paris Internationale, surrealist visions of serpents, ferrets, and octopuses emerge from the imaginations of a new generation of artists. Across Paris, the boundary between art and nature dissolves, replaced by an organic dialogue between tradition and reinvention.
Design Miami Paris 2025
Ivan Erofeev
Design Miami Paris: A Return to Nature in Saint-Germain
Now in its third edition, Design Miami Paris has returned to the iconic L’Hôtel de Maisons, the storied 18th-century mansion once home to Karl Lagerfeld and generations of the aristocratic Pozzo di Borgo family. The setting, with its formal gardens and elegant salons, feels like a natural stage for this year’s focus on the organic, the animal, and the artisanal.
Design Miami CEO Jen Roberts says of the dominant themes of nature in design at this year’s Paris edition: "The cross-pollination between nature and design has emerged as a key theme within this year’s programming. From Yves Gastou and Berehet’s joint “Early Birds” exhibition, to Lebreton’s animalistic ceramics and Galerie Mitterand’s botanical turtles, the natural world is presented in dialogue with design across different mediums and design eras with a distinct emphasis on zoomorphism. We’re noticing more than ever, how designers are responding to the fast pace of modern life with a return to nature, presenting works that offer a tranquil and playful antidote to the everyday.”
Indeed, the fair’s largest-ever Design at Large program brings together works that seem almost to breathe with life: botanical ceramics, zoomorphic furniture, and sculptural forms that merge the biological with the architectural. Here are some highlights.
Vikram Goyal’s “Soul Garden”
Among the most poetic presentations is “The Soul Garden,” an immersive installation by Vikram Goyal, presented by The Future Perfect. Set in the lush courtyard of L’Hôtel de Maisons, the project transforms the space into a sensory sanctuary filled with visual, olfactory, and spiritual nuances.
Collaborating with olfactory artist Sissel Tolaas, Goyal has created five sculpted animal forms, each representing ancient Indian philosophical virtues such as strength, wisdom, loyalty, and tranquillity. Crafted using his signature repoussé and hollowed joinery techniques, the works rest among grass embedded with nano-scent activators, releasing subtle natural fragrances as visitors move through the garden.
“In India,” Goyal reflects, “animals are sacred, sentient, divine. They embody essential virtues. This recognition of their spiritual equivalence has led to their protection and veneration for centuries.” His work, like much of the fair, channels the ancient belief that nature itself possesses intelligence, and design is one way to listen to it.
Timothée Humbert’s “Birds Everywhere”
At Galerie Daguet Bresson, French artist Timothée Humbert unveils Birds Everywhere, a fantastical collection inspired equally by tribal art and Japanese manga. Each piece combines humor and craftsmanship, benches whose wooden wings become seats, and hybrid forms that flutter between sculpture and furniture. Made in collaboration with master ébénistes in the South of France, Humbert’s works evoke freedom and flight, a modern totemism for the digital age.
Jean Dunand and the Lalanne Legacy
Historic works also find resonance with this year’s themes. At Galerie Chastel-Maréchal, Jean Dunand’s Forêt (1929) shimmers in lacquer and silver leaf, depicting birds and deer in an enchanted woodland scene, a relic from the Art Deco period, yet timeless in its vision of nature as ornament and myth.
Meanwhile, the spirit of François-Xavier and Claude Lalanne, France’s beloved design duo, is everywhere. Outside, topiary tortoises graze on the mansion’s lawn; upstairs, Galerie Mitterrand presents their menagerie of functional sculpture: alligator-backed bronze chairs, lilypad-shaped tables, and the iconic Lalanne sheep. A delicate Lampe Pigeon (1991) gleams like a relic from a dream, a reminder that in the Lalannes’ world, furniture is alive, humorous, and poetic.
Boccara Gallery complements these dialogues with a collection of rare 20th-century tapestries, bridging modernist abstraction and textile mastery, an homage to the enduring artistry of the loom.
Asia NOW: Textile Futures and Ancestral Echoes
Across the river at the Monnaie de Paris, Asia NOW–now in its eleventh edition–continues to redefine the landscape of Asian contemporary art. This year, more than 70 galleries from 28 territories participate, with a newly introduced section titled “The Third Space,” dedicated to collaboration and hybridity.
If Design Miami leans into sculpture and form, Asia NOW’s beating heart lies in textiles and storytelling. Here, fiber art becomes a metaphor for cultural weaving, with threads of memory, identity, and reinvention intertwined.
Hiromi Tango: Healing Through Fabric
At Cuturi Gallery, Japanese-Australian artist Hiromi Tango transforms the Salle Babut de Rosan into a cocoon of color and texture with her exhibition Healing Code. Tango’s sprawling textile installations, often inspired by calligraphy, incorporate fragments of kimono and obi fabrics, turning personal and cultural memory into living, tactile sculpture. Her work, rooted in ideas of healing and renewal, invites viewers to reconnect with the emotional intelligence embedded in materials.
Diren Lee: Cats, Myths, and Meditation
At Tang Contemporary, Korean artist Diren Lee captivates with her intricate paintings, each executed with a single brush. A cat with enormous cartoon-like eyes becomes both muse and mirror in her exploration of identity and mythology. “I rebuild the world with every new series,” Lee says. Her work channels both classical myths and contemporary sentiment, painting animals as metaphors for empathy and introspection.
Alongside Lee, the booth features artists Zhao Zhao, Yang Bodu, Wu Wei, Yoon Hyup, Gao Hang, and Rodel Tapaya, each reflecting Asia’s diverse and dynamic art scenes.
Sumakshi Singh: Weaving Memory
A showstopper at the Monnaie de Paris is Sumakshi Singh’s Transience Monuments, presented by 193 Gallery and TAK Contemporary. Singh’s delicate textile works, visible from the grand staircase, weave together memory and architecture. Drawing from her ancestral home in New Delhi, which she describes as “once a refuge, later a site of celebration, now only a memory”, Singh meditates on belonging and impermanence. Her embroidered architectures seem to float between material and memory, proposing that what endures is not the physical, but the emotional, the things we remember and share.
Baik Art Seoul: Between Tradition and Protest
Making its Asia NOW debut, Baik Art Seoul presents a powerful lineup from its Seoul and Jakarta programs, featuring FX Harsono, Tintin Wulia, Mella Jaarsma, Han Youngsoo, and others. Through video, textile, and mixed media, these artists tackle pressing socio-political issues, turning the personal into the political with poetic force. Their works remind us that nature and humanity are inseparable, each reflecting the resilience of the other. FX Harson’s video piece ‘Writing in the dark rain’ is a powerful highlight.
Paris Internationale: Surrealist Creatures and Domestic Dreams
Paris Internationale moves to a prestigious new home on the Champs-Élysées roundabout for its eleventh edition. Since its founding in 2015, the fair has become known for its experimental spirit, favoring intimacy and discovery over spectacle. This year’s fair feels especially cohesive, with works that channel surrealism, domesticity, and the natural world’s quiet strangeness.
Raisa Maudit: The Octopus as Oracle
At House of Chappaz (Barcelona), Raisa Maudit’s La Profecía–a hand-embroidered linen wall hanging–pulses with symbolic vitality. Hearts, branch-like motifs, and curling octopus tendrils intertwine in a vision that feels equal parts nature and magical realism. Her tactile, labor-intensive embroidery turns prophecy into pattern, stitching intuition into cloth.
