12.16.22

At Home With

In Her Object-Filled Mexico City Home, Su Wu Surrounds Herself With Gifts, Mexican Crafts, and Contemporary Design

Even though Su Wu's home has since become, in our circles, one of the most well-known stops on the Mexico City circuit of cool, it felt inevitable that we should include it in our book, How to Live With Objects — both to commemorate our long professional relationship, and to acknowledge that when you're talking about the beauty and power of objects, hers is a voice that deserves to be part of the conversation. Wu is a staunch champion of the local Mexican design scene, using her home — which she shares with her husband, the artist Alma Allen, and their two children — as a place to co-curate exhibitions and showcase her ever-growing collection of gifts, Mexican crafts, and contemporary art and design.
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09.23.14

At Home With

Su Wu, Writer

There are people you meet in life to whom you feel a deep and immediate connection, so much so that the particulars of how and why you both arrived at the same place at the same time matter much less than the fact that you did. That’s pretty much how we feel about Su Wu, whose inspiring blog I’m Revolting we admired from afar for months before reaching out two years ago, asking her to collaborate, and becoming instant friends. Earlier this summer, however, when we found out that one of our favorite photographers would be visiting LA, we realized this was the perfect time to find out a bit more about the circumstances that led Wu to where she is right now, both philosophically and quite literally — the downtown LA loft she calls home.
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04.05.23

Current Obsession

On the Great Pine Resurgence of 2023 — AKA For Pine Nuts Who Love It Knotty

Have you been reading For Scale? It's the new furniture-focused Substack that seemingly everyone is already turned onto, and we get it — it's an absolute joy to read, with favorite topics so far including but not being limited to: plastic, children's furniture, the "twink aesthetic," and Psycho-Decorating 101 (a favorite Sight Unseen tome). So, we did what any editor with half a brain would do: We hired For Scale's excellent and very fun writer, David Michon, to pen what we hope is the first of many columns! Today's subject: a paean to PINE.
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10.13.22

Sighted

Menu’s New Icons Collection is Betting Big on Reissues

This week, a meme circulated online, contending that home goods had officially supplanted sneakers as "the new flex." Like all memes, there was a certain amount of tongue-in-cheekness about it mixed with a healthy dollop of truth: Over the past few years, we've watched as lamp after lamp, mirror after mirror became the hot new "it" accessory. But, like sneakers, home goods tend to inspire the most fervor when they're a bit more rare and harder to come by. Drop a new (old) design into the marketplace, the thinking seems to go, however, and watch the feeding frenzy begin. I would venture to guess this is a large part of why brands have suddenly decided to reissue their old designs en masse, including MENU, which has relaunched a half-dozen mid-century designs in a collection they're calling Icons.
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06.13.22

Graphic Design

A Surrealist Wine Label, and Other Graphic Design Picks For June

Each month The Brand Identity shares with our readers a selection of the most interesting studios, packaging designs, and branding and identity projects featured recently on their site. This month: an uptown hotel with a new downtown vibe, a Mallorcan yoga studio identity inspired by Joan Miró, and a Surrealist wine label that celebrates the unexpectedness of every vintage (above).
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10.08.20

Excerpt: Exhibition

Duro Olowu’s Mind-Expanding Chicago Exhibition Crosses Time, Place, Gender, and Race

Duro Olowu: Seeing Chicago, the highly anticipated exhibition curated by the Nigerian-born British designer, was up for only two weeks at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago before the pandemic shutdown of last March. But when the MCA re-opened, it thankfully extended the show's run into early fall. Walking through the rooms — teeming with over 300 works Olowu selected from the city’s public and private art collections — was a bit like scrolling through a really engaging, unpredictable Instagram account, but without the glazed exhaustion and listlessness that comes from being so online. Or the frustration of being on the outside looking in. This was a show that welcomed you.
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01.31.14

Excerpt: Exhibition

Thaddeus Wolfe: Unsurfacing at Volume Gallery

Thaddeus Wolfe's Assemblage vases looked mysterious enough when he debuted them in 2011, first for sale with Matter and then with a special edition for Chicago's Volume Gallery — we'd never seen glass before that paired the shape and surface texture of rocks and minerals with amazing fades of opaque color. When we asked him to describe his process to us, it turned out that it was relatively easy to grasp, if not execute: He blew the vessels into faceted plaster-and-silicon molds. His newest take on the series — the Unsurfacing collection for Volume, on view as of tonight — looks even more complicated, layered with fragmented geometric patterns and contrasting colors.
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12.23.13

Excerpt: Magazine

Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Lost Interview with Ettore Sottsass, From Surface Magazine

It's no secret that we're devotees of the work of the late Italian design legend Ettore Sottsass, but to the extent that everyone we know has been caught up lately in the more superficial elements of his influence — the post-modernist colors, patterns, and geometries — we jumped at the chance to share with you this reminder of his intellectual legacy: one of several previously unpublished interviews with Sottsass conducted by Hans Ulrich Obrist in 2001. It was given to us as a little holiday present by Surface magazine's new editor Spencer Bailey, who oversaw its inclusion in the Dec/Jan Art Issue, which was co-edited by ForYourArt founder Bettina Korek and is the fourth since Surface was redesigned and reimagined this past July. Says Bailey: "Last fall, I was talking with Serpentine Gallery co-director Hans Ulrich Obrist over dinner in London about his unpublished interviews with artists and designers. He mentioned that he has several with Ettore Sottsass, so I asked him to send them to me. This one in particular blew me away. Hans Ulrich is a master interviewer, and Sottsass is, well, Sottsass. When I was putting together Surface's first annual Art Issue, I just knew I had to publish it." Sight Unseen is the only place on the web you can read the entire edited interview as it ran in the magazine — check it out after the jump, including images added by us, and don't forget to subscribe to Surface when you're done!
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05.25.22

Fair Report

New York Design Week, We Missed You — Here Are 25 Favorites From the Festival That Was

Well, after two years of fallow Mays due to COVID delays (and a November iteration of NYCxDesign that barely registered), New York Design Week returned with a vengeance this month. Its de facto kick-off was the incredible MASA exhibition, curated by Su Wu, which opened in a former post office in Rockefeller Center and remains a high-water mark for the month. The festivities finally ended last week with a rager of a party at Matter Projects for a dual exhibition with furniture designer Minjae Kim and his mother, the painter Myoungae Lee, which we'll cover more in-depth on the site this week. Here are our favorite projects from the past few weeks.
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Guide to Mexico City
11.22.19

An Afternoon With

A Tour of Mexico City’s Secret Spots With One of Its Biggest Tastemakers

Despite being a recent transplant, Su Wu — who rose to prominence as a writer and curator with her cult-favorite blog I’m Revolting — is already a fixture on the local art and design scene in Mexico City. Spending the day with her would be a dream assignment for any design writer, or really anyone who considers themselves a fan of good things and great stories. From her family home to an all-but-lost Noguchi mural tucked away above a bustling downtown market, Wu’s vision of Mexico City stays true to her own compelling vernacular.
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02.06.15

Eye Candy

Daniel Steegmann Mangrané’s Steel Curtains

We first caught sight of one of Daniel Steegmann Mangrané's colorful curtains at Esther Schipper gallery's booth at Frieze New York last year, where we couldn't stop taking pictures of how nicely it framed the crowds rushing by on the other side. But we'd forgotten all about the Spanish-born, Brazilian-based artist until more of those curtains popped up on Sight Unseen contributor Su Wu's blog I'm Revolting last week. Steegmann appears to have a very philosophically rich practice, full of meshes and grids and insect forms that reference Brazilian oil laborers and the writings of Roger Caillois, but the curtains, from what we can tell, are pure formalism, and the best kind — they completely transform your experience of a space. They curtains themselves are made from steel mesh and produced by a Spanish interiors company called KriskaDecor, but with geometric cutouts lined in laser-cut and powder-coated steel frames.
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