Here, we ask designers to take a selfie and give us an inside look at their life.
Bio: Chen Chen & Kai Williams, Industrial Designers, 41 (both)
Hometown: Chen, Shanghai; Kai, Manhattan
Studio Location: Brooklyn, New York
Describe what you make: We make products across a wide range of categories from handmade decorative arts to industrially manufactured products.
The most important thing you’ve designed to date: Our Geology Transition Mirror is the most well known of our works. It combines a wide range of techniques and materials and the works are at once maximal and minimal.
Describe the problem your work solves: It doesn’t solve any problems. Our studio is a vehicle for our personal discovery of the world and when we find something interesting we turn around and show it to you.
Describe the project you are working on now: We just finished a body of work for our show “Basic Instinct” at The Future Perfect so at the moment we are working on long neglected issues with our studio. Working on your work space is self care.
A new or forthcoming project we should know about: Our show “Basic Instinct” [was recently on view at] The Future Perfect. There’s continuation of materials we explored before, developed into more rich iterations, and there’s exploration of new materials, for us that is wood. Over the last two years, as we spot a tree being cut down in our neighborhood, we go and collect some wood to work with. Every log has the address of where it used to live.
What you absolutely have to have in your studio: When someone joins our studio, they are issued Bluetooth ear protection as there’s quite a bit of machine noise. Everyone is in their little podcast world and we discuss what we’ve been listening to during lunch. Snack wise, everyone is fueled on Spindrift, Celsius, and peanuts from Costco.
What you do when you’re not working: Everything somehow returns to work. Because of the broad nature of our practice, we’ve managed to turn every hobby into some kind of studio output. A lot of the motifs used in the wood pieces in “Basic Instinct” come from a cat tree Chen made for his cats in 2021. The hardware in this show, and especially evident in the small boxes, were all ideas drawn from a box Kai made for his son.
Sources of creative envy: Henry Mercer who built Fonthill Castle in Doylestown, PA. along with the Moravian Tile Works and the Mercer Museum. Artisanal production at scale is something we’re interested in. How do you scale production and leave in a trace of the hand?
The distraction you want to eliminate: Our leaky roof. I once saw a home improvement show where half the budget goes to water mitigation. That’s the real stuff.
This or that?
Concrete or marble? Marble
High-Rise Or Townhouse? High-Rise
Remember Or Forget? Forget
Aliens Or Ghosts? Aliens
Dark Or Light? Light
