Meet Yuxuan Huang | Furniture Designer

We had the good fortune of connecting with Yuxuan Huang and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Yuxuan, why did you pursue a creative career?
I’m always motivated by the beauty of everyday mundane life, and how normal materials and objects could be elevated through design and bring surprises to people.

I have a background in conceptual art and moved to furniture making since covid time. It was a dark time for me and the world, and I really wish there can be some hope come into my life and light up the world. Being isolated at home for three month triggers me to rethink about how fine arts is distant to people’s daily life, and how little it can do for people. So do the speculative designs which move objects and design to a conceptual standard and the future, whereas people live in here and now. I wish to make art that could conceptually and physically let people feel the warmth, the serendipity, the poetics of the world without distance in a daily basis.

Furniture is the perfect medium for this. I still approach furniture in a very conceptual art way at the stage of brainstorming, but always prioritize functionality, craftmanship in the stage of designing and manufacturing to make sure they’re suitable for daily uses. Materiality is the key for me to generate the poetics and narratives that create the hope, surprises, and sense of connection in my work. I believe the sense of poetics is always highly related to nature because of its beauty, its vagueness, its constant change, and the atmosphere or aura it shapes. In the realm of furniture making, all the beauty of nature is embedded in the subtlety of materiality—the substances we gather from nature and manipulate through our human minds. That’s why I always choose natural and sustainable material to create my work.

Alright, so let’s move onto what keeps you busy professionally?
My main body of work, “Lost Stories”, is a collection of furniture and objects featuring a deconstructive reimagination of antique furniture with the aim of passing on the stories of people and objects lost in time. Encountering furniture that has outlasted the unknown lives of those who created them, lived with them, and left marks on them, the collection intends to evoke a sense of humanity by delving into objects’ encapsulated stories and memories. By deconstructing antique furniture into components, Lost Stories returns furniture to a raw material state and liberates narratives and puzzles of the past from their preconceived forms. The new materiality includes elements such as dirty paint, scratches, glue marks, and dust. By collaging the deconstructed materials into a minimalistic form and adding the illustrative silhouette of the original object back to the new design, the collection continues the reincarnation of an object as well as the story of life behind it in a sustainable way.

Besides this collection, I call my design method “writing in design”. I discover poems existing in natural materials, simplistic forms, light, and shadow. My design seeks the right forms and techniques to bring out the hidden poetries of materials and deliver these subtle messages to living spaces. Sometimes I write stories in furniture—stories about people, lives, the unpredictable, and sighs. Furniture is a capsule of faded memories and an ongoing witness of time. Through the stories I tell and the furniture I make, I seek a care for humanity in furniture making beyond form, functionality, and materiality.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
This is a little bit nerdy, but I will plan an art/furniture gallery tour. There’re many great furniture galleries and showrooms that definitely worth checking out. I will say The Future Perfect and Marta will be the top of my list.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
I want to shoutout to strangers! Since childhood, I’ve harbored a deep empathy for the lives of strangers who pass by me. I feel grateful for their ephemeral existence in my life and recognize how mere seconds of crossing paths could potentially alter the trajectory of my destiny. I wish for something or someone who could remember all the liveliness that has existed in the world and eventually faded away. These experiences with strangers and their story inspired me to create my current collection of furniture, and will always lighten me in the future.

Website: yuxuan-huang.com

Instagram: @yuxuan_huang__