Seletti and Marc’Antonio: Ki nto sui gi Heads

Two porcelain faces emerge from the dark, their surfaces fractured and traced with warm 24-karat gold. Seletti’s Ki nto sui gi Heads, a collaboration with designer Marc’Antonio, brings the Japanese art of kintsugi, the practice of mending broken ceramics with precious metal, into the realm of sculptural home objects. The title itself bridges cultures: kintsugi philosophy meeting the Japanese word for face.

Seletti’s Ki nto sui gi Heads, a collaboration between the Venetian ceramics house and designer Marc’Antonio, translate the Japanese art of kintsugi into sculptural form. Two porcelain faces, fractured by design and traced with 24-karat gold leaf, become vessels for cut flowers, their breaks transformed into functional voids.

The collection consists of two distinct portrait heads in fine white porcelain, each marked by deliberate fractures that map across cheekbones and foreheads. Where traditional kintsugi repairs invisible damage to centuries-old vessels, these heads wear their breaks as ornament from the moment of making. The gold leaf settles into the fissures with purposeful drama, catching light as the fractures create a visual rhythm across the surface.

Within each head sits a hollow chamber, a void created by the breakage pattern itself, intended to hold cut flowers. A single stem or small arrangement sits suspended within the fracture, turning what reads as damage into a vessel for living blooms. Delicate prints adorning the porcelain add another layer of detail, hand-painted or applied imagery marking the care of each piece.

The collaboration brings together distinct sensibilities. Seletti, founded in 1979 by Marcello Simonini, has built its reputation on playful, conceptual takes on the decorative object, working with designers and artists across industries from its base near Florence. Marc’Antonio, a Sicilian designer, has long explored the intersection of classical form and fragmentation across sculpture, installation and product design. For Ki nto sui gi, the two explore what happens when broken things mended with gold become more valuable than their unbroken predecessors, scaling that philosophy into portrait form.

The Ki nto sui gi Heads arrive as sculptural vases priced at €198 each, approximately 23 centimetres in height, hand-finished in white porcelain with 24-karat gold leaf applied to the fractured surfaces. The collection launches in early 2025, available through Seletti’s official channels and selected design retailers internationally.

Seletti was founded in 1979 by Marcello Simonini, a design-driven approach to ceramics and homewares that has built a reputation for reimagining domestic objects as conceptual art. Based in Lastra a Signa, near Florence, the house works with designers and artists across industries to create pieces that balance wit, craft and philosophical depth. Marc’Antonio, the Sicilian designer collaborating on Ki nto sui gi, has long explored the intersection of classical form and contemporary fragmentation, his practice spanning sculpture, installation and product design across Europe and beyond.

The Ki nto sui gi Heads arrive as sculptural vases priced at €198 each, available through Seletti’s official channels and selected design retailers internationally. Each head measures approximately 23 centimetres in height, hand-finished in white porcelain with 24-karat gold leaf applied to the fractured surfaces. The collection launches in early 2025, positioning itself within the growing conversation around Japanese philosophy as a lens for Western design practice, where wabi-sabi principles and the beauty of impermanence shape contemporary luxury objects.

The kintsugi methodology, practised for centuries in Japan, traditionally repairs broken vessels by sealing cracks with lacquer mixed with powdered precious metals, honoring the object’s history rather than erasing it. By translating this repair philosophy into deliberate sculptural breaks on new pieces, Seletti and Marc’Antonio invert the traditional timeline: these heads are born broken, their fractures planned and their gold applied as part of their original making. This conceptual move transforms the collection from ornamental vessel into philosophical statement about how contemporary design might embrace imperfection as its starting point.

Imagery courtesy of Seletti (@seletti).