A Designer’s Quest: Furong Chen
At this spring’s Design Shanghai, Design Anthology sat down with Furong Chen, recipient of the inaugural show’s Emerging Chinese Designer award who has now returned as an exhibitor. Chen talks about his journey as a designer, what he’s learned along the way and how the award has helped shape the early years of his career
Design Anthology: When did you first know that design was your chosen career path?
Furong Chen: A few years ago, I participated in an exhibition called Metaphysics. We drove a van and travelled more than 10,000 kilometres across China looking for special local creators. We shot a documentary throughout the journey and in the end made an exhibit in Shanghai of all the ‘designers’ we encountered. One was disabled, and he developed mechanical prosthetics for himself and people all over the world. Another was making a mechanical walking elephant for his sixtieth birthday, and another was living in the mountains and doing a lot of sculpture just for fun. I thought they were all good designers and living a very natural life. I love design too, and I want to devote myself fully to design and make design my lifelong career.
Where did you study?
I studied Integrated Design at Shanghai Institute of Visual Art. It’s a very experimental programme dedicated to exploring the boundaries between design and art.
How do you feel now about what you learned at school and how applicable it’s been in the field?
I think it has been. What is cultivated in school is a way of doing things and thinking.
What were the biggest challenges that you faced in starting your career?
The problem that we as designers always face is how to balance artistry with commerciality. Every year there are countless new design products entering the market. How we make a well-designed product that considers how people will use it and is manufactured with solid craftsmanship — it’s a big challenge, not just a complete design concept!
Also, I don’t want to just add one more piece to the millions of design products out there. I want every piece of my work to stand the test of time, even if it’s a much slower design-to- market time frame than other brands.
How have collaborations played a role in your evolving design language?
While we’ve been focused on developing and improving the WUU product system, I believe crossover collaborations are always interesting. For example, I’m designing a mirror called Looking for Dorian for Maison Dada. It’s different from WUU’s very rational design approach — it’s more emotional. So it’s interesting for me. And our newly launched lighting collection STARGAZER is also more emotional than before.
What, if any, advantage does working in China allow you?
In China, we can work more directly with the factories, which constantly adds to our understanding of the technological process.
Is there something in particular that you hope people will experience through your work?
I hope that after ten or twenty years people will still appreciate our design and its details. I hope our products will be used for a long time. When people look at the finer details of our products, I hope they’ll see and appreciate our craftsmanship.
How important do you think winning the inaugural Emerging Chinese Designer award at Design Shanghai was for your career? And what sort of exposure are you hoping to receive from exhibiting at Design Shanghai?
The Emerging Chinese Designer award was very important for me. Through the platform, more people came to know of me and my brand, and it gave me a good launch pad from which to start my design career.
Now, as our brand is more mature, I hope to meet more partners at the fair with whom we can do business. At the same time, I also hope to meet other creators who are just as passionate about design as I am.
As told to / Suzy Annetta
Images / Courtesy of WUU
