Nicolas Winding Refn and Hideo Kojima Bring Their Long-Distance Friendship to Hotel Chelsea
At Hotel Chelsea in New York, two artists better known for cinema and video games have turned an unusual friendship into an installation about distance, technology, and emotional risk. Satellites II, on view June 3–7 as part of Prada Mode, expands a work first presented at Prada’s Aoyama store in Tokyo in 2025.
The installation is built from retro-futuristic television sets, silver rooms, cloud imagery, and scattered cassette tapes. Its surfaces feel sleek and slightly haunted, as if the future arrived carrying relics from the past. That tension suits Nicolas Winding Refn, the Danish filmmaker born in 1970, and Hideo Kojima, the Japanese game designer born in 1963, whose collaboration has developed through years of remote exchange.
The two have communicated through photos, videos, music, emojis, letters, and text messages. Kojima first reached out after the release of Drive in 2011, and Refn later provided motion capture for a character in Kojima’s 2019 game Death Stranding. Their partnership has since widened beyond a single project, with both artists describing a creative rapport shaped by difference rather than similarity.
That idea sits at the center of Satellites II. The work uses technology not simply as subject matter, but as a metaphor for how people stay connected without collapsing into one another. Kojima said that if communication becomes too close, “you might clash or develop wrong emotional conclusions.” Refn responded that “you show yourself a lot when you can’t use words.”
The installation also moves through larger themes: identity, death, UFOs, and vulnerability. Kojima called the pair “old friends” and suggested that, like satellites, their relationship does not rise or fall in any simple way. Refn, meanwhile, said the collaboration has made them feel increasingly interconnected, almost “as one.”
For now, the project remains grounded in New York. But the artists have already imagined a more expansive future, joking that their next show might appear on Mars. In the meantime, Satellites II offers a precise portrait of creative affinity: not fusion, but orbit.
