The fashion for fusion furniture
- Source: Global Times
- [10:26 July 21 2010]
- Comments
Danful Yang Photo: Courtesy of Contrast Gallery
The idea of art for art's sake – freed from any didactic, moral or utilitarian purpose – is not one that Danful Yang readily ascribes to. The Shanghai-born designer expresses her creativity through perhaps the most practical and functional of forms – furniture. And her singular take on these everyday household items more than qualifies the sacrosanct term 'art" to be attached to them.
An economics major from the East China University of Science and Technology, Danful switched tracks when she landed a job at the Contrast Gallery on Hengshan Road. Founded by the Hong Kong heiress and art collector Pearl Lam in 2005 (she now has similar spaces in Beijing and Hanghzhou), the gallery promotes cutting-edge furniture design. And in her initial role helping gallery design-ers source Chinese handicrafts, Danful carefully observed how these artists worked, while gradually formulating her own ideas about furniture. After two years she felt ready to strike out on her own and has enjoyed considerable success since, although she admits that "art-furniture" is still a nebulous concept in China.
"In China, the people involved in this line of work are seen as craftsmen and women; only in the West would they be termed 'designers,'" she says. "This is because Chinese furniture is more about construction and fine craftsmanship, while Westerners focus more on the form of the piece."
"Personally, I know very few Chinese art furniture designers. Most of my colleagues in this field are foreigners."
For this reason, all of the pieces exhibited at the Contrast Gallery are built in China, in an effort to better integrate the designs with Chinese aesthetics and stylings. This is a policy adopted by the gallery to help boost original, homegrown art-furniture works. According to Danful, this also provides a vital boost to the country's dwindling handicraft industry.
"Pure works of art, as such, cannot benefit these industries," Danful says. "Many of them are national treasures and yet they are on the brink of extinction. But art-furniture pieces can help. For example, the famous ceramic vases made in Jingdezhen in Jiangxi province still employ the ancient form of pottery making. And by using them in some of my table designs, this is helping keep the tradition alive."
The vases Danful refers to are used in a piece called Vase Coffee Table. While it may be common enough to see vases on the surface, using them as legs to support a piece of furniture is a novelty indeed. Eschewing the use of sophisticated wood carving techniques in the design, the table top is a circular piece of glass.
"The message I'm sending out with this piece is that if you can just think outside of the box, then life can be full of surprises. Design isn't necessarily a difficult mission. I think everyone can be a good designer. What's important is that you put all your creativity into everything you do."
In another work entitled Magazine Table, Danful has engraved pop-icon images, of the type found in magazines, into the wooden surface of the table, including perfume bottles, luxury watches and Hello Kitty. Her aim in this piece is to underline how our daily lives are saturated with information and images from the media, and how this influences "everything we do, eat and wear." "For example, there's the saying that breakfast should be fit for a king, lunch for a prince, and dinner for a pauper. We are always being forced to absorb these ideas as if we should live our lives by them."
