China’s Most Influential Design Duo on the Country’s Future As a Cultural Powerhouse

To understand the contemporary design scene in China, learning about Neri&Hu’s work is a prerequisite. The country has experienced phenomenal social and architectural growth over the last two decades, and the pair have been a key part of the powerful creative driving force behind it, contributing numerous landmark designs inside and outside the country. I spoke with them about their current projects, and China’s place in the modern world.

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09.28.20

Sight Unseen Presents

Guest Editor Yoko Choy Explores the Work in Progress That is Chinese Design

Chinese design is still finding its way and is too diverse to be captured in a neat single identity. So while the global community may be eager to create a brand for this emerging body of work, defining it is still a work in progress. In the 15 years I’ve been working as a design journalist, I’ve been asked constantly, “What is Chinese Design”? I, too, have been asking myself that same question. And I feel that now I’m finally seeing an answer (or answers) and am proud to share my discoveries, some of which formed the basis for my guest-editor curation this week.

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09.27.18

Interiors

Is This New, Gleaming Bookstore in Hangzhou the Future of Books?

We marvel at pretty much every bookstore brave enough to open in today's retail landscape, but that goes double for the new Harbook shop in Hangzhou, designed by the Shanghai studio of Alberto Caiola. A sprawling 6,500 square-foot playground filled with monumental custom furnishings and rows of thick steel archways, it's almost touching in how it seems to channel the glory days of the early 2000s, when ambitious "concept stores" still flourished and Amazon hadn't yet ruined books for everyone else.

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01.22.14

Q+A

Henny Nistelrooy on I’m Revolting

Like so many small-town kids before him, Henny van Nistelrooy didn’t move to just any city. He moved to the most tightly layered and epochally dense cities he could find, the sorts of places that have already had a dozen lifetimes. After graduating from London's Royal College of Art, Van Nistelrooy launched his design studio in London in 2008 and then moved to Beijing, another capital with more than a bit of historical fiber. They’re fitting locales for Van Nistelrooy’s textile process of taking seemingly finished material and slowly unraveling the threads for an entirely new weave.

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10.10.11

Fair Report

At Beijing Design Week

When you live all the way around the globe, visiting China for the first time for any reason — even for work, even for an international design fair, even to a sprawling modern metropolis like Beijing — is going to be mostly about visiting China for the first time. The way the pollution shocks your system, the deliciousness of the food: These are the kinds of experiences you begin eagerly tracking the moment you leave the airport. It's no wonder, then, that I enjoyed Beijing Design Week so much — almost all of the work, whether international or Chinese in origin, was presented in ways that made you feel like you couldn't have been anywhere else.

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02.16.10

The Making of

Urban Daily Life by Reineke Otten

When Reineke Otten visits a new city, it feels a bit like looking at Richard Scarry’s children’s books, their pages crammed with the minutiae of daily life. As a “streetologist,” her job is to scrutinize the often mundane details of places like Paris or Dubai, photographing dozens of window shades, doorbells, and flea market stalls until she’s put together a revealing portrait of the local culture. Though most of Otten’s clients pay her for her sleuthing skills, her new website Urban Daily Life offers the rest of us a glimpse into what it's like to see the world through a magnifying glass.

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