Words The Kanto team
Images Jia CURATED
For 2026, Jia CURATED bids 2025’s abandoned theme park walls adieu for sandy shores and turquoise waters as Bali’s annual craft and design weekend lands at Pengembak Beach, whose more expansive, sun-kissed horizons give the festival room for its largest edition yet: five days, over 250 participating brands, and visiting international buyers scouting the region’s makers. This year’s theme, Nature Weave, proposes that craft and material are extensions of the landscape, a lens that runs through nearly everything in the program.
The seaside location also makes for the perfect nest in welcoming a neighboring archipelago as its spotlight nation — the Philippines arrives through Tomorrow, a curated exhibition built on the idea of reconnecting with the earth, helmed by industrial designer Gabriel Lichauco and staged through NEWFOLK, a platform for forward-thinking Filipino designers, artists, and producers.
Kanto is a media partner for Jia CURATED 2026 and will be covering the event live on the ground for the first time — full dispatches to follow!
Tomorrow exhibitor Cara Mia Tomorrow exhibitor Chini Lichangco
The Philippines, Front and Center
Every year, a country nabs the spotlight on the strength of its design momentum; Taiwan held it for Jia CURATED 2025; for 2026, all eyes are on the Philippines. Tomorrow, this year’s featured country showcase is interested in pushing natural conversation and collaboration, forging a reciprocal relationship with the earth, built on slowing down enough to notice what the land already offers.
Tomorrow exhibitor Edward Sibunga Tomorrow exhibitor Jasser Aguila
Lichauco curates the show himself, featuring nine designers and ten Filipino craft workshops that populate the exhibition, work that reads traditional craft and contemporary design as a single continuous practice; it mirrors a pairing model across Jia CURATED that treats design as a collective act, assembled link by link across a chain of makers.
Kanto will be in conversation with the curator and the designer-manufacturer pairs behind Tomorrow — expect a closer look at their Jia CURATED presentations in an upcoming feature series.
Planting Collaborative Seeds
Making its debut this year is Project Benih (Benih being the Indonesian word for seed), a cross-border initiative that brings designers from Indonesia, Japan, and Taiwan into a shared space with a dozen Indonesian makers and manufacturers; alongside a look back at each designer’s own body of work, program curators Budiman Ong (Indonesia), Shi Kai Tseng (Taiwan) and Jin Kuramoto (Japan) will help pair designer to maker to kickstart collaborations that start from actual creative fit, not assignment.
The nine participating designers are
Indonesia
- Alvin Tjitrowirjo – alvinT
- Budiman Ong – ONG CEN KUANG
- Denny R Priyatna – AIEVL
Taiwan
- Chialing Chang – messagingleaving
- Po-Chieh Chang – zhēnzhēn Stained Glass Lab
- Shikai Tseng – studio shikai
Japan
- Jin Kuramoto – JIN KURAMOTO STUDIO
- Sae Honda – Sae Honda Design
- Shogo Kishino
The 12 Indonesian manufacturers and artisans are Bamboo Pure, BIKA Living, CushCush, DuAnyam, Greenman Banana Paper Studio, Maharani Craft, ROA, Setia Cap Cili, Siji, STVMP, Taga Woodcraft, and Threadapeutic.
From there, the paired teams will spend the year developing a joint project to unveil at Jia CURATED 2027, after which the results travel on to Japan and Taiwan as a touring show.
Elsewhere at Pengembak Beach
By Kanto’s reading, the expansive exhibitor list splits along a familiar line: material grown and nurtured versus material reclaimed. Some notables include Blancostudio x Kalpa Taru Bali’s pavilion, built alongside Bali Landscape Company, which takes the slow, organic route to completion, leaving a canopy to keep growing into the timber-offcut structure over the five days on-site, with the growth journey serving as the structure’s facade. On the flip side, STVMP’s The MetalLab runs cast-off materials and novel ideas through a workspace split between archive and workshop until the discarded material metamorphoses into a collectible. That same appetite for giving worn material new duty carries over into Jia CURATED’s own Waste to Wonder 2.0, which puts last year’s event materials back to work: worn roofing sheets become sun-shading devices, discarded cardboard bolsters current exhibit setups, and spent packaging crates are reborn as seating.
Wasted by Potato Head Anjati Home
High-quality surface laminate manufacturer Lamitak, Jia CURATED’s Main Partner, sits between the two schools of thought with The Intelligence of Surfaces, an installation developed with Bali studio DDAP Architect that translates the brand’s approach to materiality into a multi-sensorial space.
Sungai Design Triboa Bay Living LUAR iFuji
Scale Models and Serious Talk
Architecture in Scale returns for a second year, featuring maquettes from 25 practices across the region:
- AGo Architects
- Alexis Dornier
- andramatin
- andyrahman architect
- BEAU Architects; Architecture Land Initiative
- Bensley Design Studio Bali
- Blancostudio
- Cave Urban
- CHANG Architects
- Cheng Tsung Feng
- DDAP Architect
- Gappa lab
- IBUKU Studio
- Infinitive Architecture
- Inspiral Architecture and Design Studios
- KantorGG (Kantor Gunawan Gunawan)
- KATA Design Studio
- MIV Architects
- Nitkala Arsitek
- PAN – PROJECTS
- Paulus Setyabudi Architect
- SHAU
- Tamara Wibowo Architects
- Yolodi+Maria Architects
- KENGO KUMA + Associates
Charmaine Chan, design editor at the South China Morning Post, curates this edition around the festival theme, showcasing projects that regard nature as a structural premise rather than a mere backdrop. The lineup is mostly Indonesia-based practices, running the gamut of formal and material expression.
The 360° Design Dialogues talks, curated by Design Anthology, will feature established and emerging creative voices, with English designer Bethan Laura Wood, Australian architect Peter Stutchbury, South Korea’s Kwangho Lee, and Singapore’s Gabriel Tan among the panelists debating on the burning topics of the day, such as collaboration, practice, and representation.
Global media contingents (like yours truly) are also raring to ogle Balinese studio ATMA’s redesign of the Media Lounge, which borrows from traditional Balinese concepts of tetaring (temporary shelter) and natah (gathering place) to give journalists a roof over our heads and somewhere to actually sit still amidst the creative buzz.
What Comes After
Jia CURATED positions itself as invested in design’s full life cycle, from the moment it’s made and into what happens once the tents and stands come down. A program built on gotong royong (collective effort) and nature folded into the design process has real follow-through to prove. Beyond the talks, the models, and the pavilions on the sand, for Jia CURATED co-founder Budiman Ong, the questions this edition raises must extend well past the five days on-site.
“Curation goes far beyond selecting participants or presenting work within a venue,” Ong says. “It is about applying a design approach to the entire experience, from spatial planning and visitor flow to atmosphere, dialogue, and interaction. Ultimately, Jia CURATED is not simply about showcasing individual works. It is about building connection, between designers, craftspeople, brands, institutions, and communities across Indonesia and beyond.” •
Jia CURATED 2026
13–17 August, 12pm–10pm
Pengembak Beach, Jl. Pengembak, Sanur, Bali
Buy your tickets at jiacurated.com
