The Design District
100 Percent
Following the Surface magazine piece on the two New Yorker-based creative directors, Tobias Wong and Aric Chen, curating 100 Percent Design Shanghai exhibition, I was curious to see photos…not having round-trip-ticket-to-China money in the bank. Fortunately Core77 us covered with this portfolio.
The cultural juxtaposition seems kind of crazy (check out the Danish textile company Kvadrat’s hand-drawn naif designs “for the Chinese market”). I like the more-is-more-ism of Richard Hutten’s magnetic leaves on his Green House for its twisting of green+house back on themselves. But Gwen Design’s sofa, the seat of which is made of upright paint/calligraphy brushes…at first I wanted to like it for its reference to a bed of nails, but then started thinking it was clever.
ASIDE: At another considerably more low-brow exhibition recently (that will go unnamed), I kept hearing viewers saying how “clever” an object was. They meant it as a compliment. I rarely do, do you?
These vessels from Shanghai-based design mwv (Ming Xu and Virginie Moriette) are my new favorite things:
