Among the main activities and satellite events of the 2024 edition of the fair Design Shanghai – Shanghai, 19-22 June 2024 – one of the most eagerly awaited was the exhibition Talents, which offered an overview of emerging designers and studios primarily based in China. Twenty-four independent firms, chosen by the designer and curator Frank Chou.
This platform was developed for the first time in 2020, launched by Design Shanghai with the aim of supporting young designers in their careers, while improving the design ecosystem in China. The show provided an important international showcase, encouraging the dialogue between creativity and business. Under the theme “The Quest For The Question,” this year’s event challenged rising talents not only to find innovative solutions to concrete problems, but also to evaluate their effective practical impact.
Ming-Li Chang, a designer who grew up in Taiwan and Yunnan and now operates in Los Angeles and Shanghai, presented the Dai table lamp. With a degree from the Art Center College of Design in 2021, Chang mixes multicultural influences in his work, redefining the concept of new Chinese design. Dai is made almost entirely in ceramic material. The shade and the base, similar to forms sculpted in plaster, rest on a ceramic part made in Jingdezhen, the result of collaboration between local artists and craftsmen. The particular feature of the base lies in the unique glazes that bring out texture and infinite expressive possibilities.
Studio Ololoo, founded by two young designers from Ningbo with experiences in Germany and Italy, presented new creations in Shanghai that explore everyday materials and phenomena with an analytical and sensitive approach. They include the Deformation Under Pressure lamp in inflatable PVC, already a winner in April at the Salone Satellite in Milan, a vase in recyclable TPU and stainless steel, and a stool that reinterprets the game of soap bubbles: the air sack in TPU, attached to the seat, is shaped by a wooden ring, creating an organic cushion with the form of a bubble.
The Pilot Sofa designed by the duo Tang Badham (Shawn Tang and Sachio Badham, both graduates in Architecture at Harvard), is a modular seating system that combines essential forms and vivid expression. Based on children’s games involving sand, the Pilot Sofa is composed of geometric blocks covered in lively fabric, an invitation to relax and to interact. “With Pilot,” the designers say, “we wanted to bring people together in the most playful and primordial way possible.”
Individual and collective stories that reveal the variety and vitality of the Talents platform, announcing the rise of a new generation of Chinese designers ready to guide the evolution of Asian design towers unexplored creative horizons.
