It Calls Itself the "China International Furniture Fair." This Year, "International" Is Still a Long Way Off

If you want to sell a lifestyle, you can't keep running an export-goods clearance sale.

In its 22nd year, China's largest furniture fair is trying to cram in far too many ideas at once.

The "China International Furniture Fair" opened on September 8 — except that this year the name runs unusually long, with "Modern Shanghai Fashion & Lifestyle Expo" tacked on after the familiar part. The organizer, Shanghai UBM Sinoexpo, wants to widen the show from the furniture trade into home furnishing as a whole, and into lifestyle display, so it built this themed expo alongside the original fair.

Put plainly: they want to show not just furniture but everything that might turn up in a home, not just the big pieces but the small ones too.

For many furniture companies, this "China International Furniture Fair" works as a sales fair. The setup gives it away. On day one the show admits trade visitors only — manufacturers, buyers, dealers, designers, media. Most of them arrive with orders in hand, and the factories in Zhejiang, Guangdong and elsewhere can get to work. The message at the heart of a show like this is simple: look, here are the styles we can make this year.

With China as the "world's factory," a fair like this inevitably takes on the color of export-oriented manufacturing repackaged as high-end goods for the home market. The same pieces turn up again and again at different booths. A Hans Wegner round chair, for instance, might appear in more than 20 colors and 10 materials, at strikingly low prices — much as it does across Taobao shops. These exhibitors don't lay out a display so much as work out how to fit the most merchandise into the space they've paid for.

Elsewhere, walking the booths feels rather like walking through a Red Star Macalline store. Higher-end brands such as KUKA Home and HC 28 exhibit too. After a few halls you start to grasp what European, American and New Chinese styles each stand for. Unlike the export-trade exhibitors, the big brands care about presentation, and their booths are usually enclosed — they want you to feel you have stepped into a real show home.

Only in 2010 did voices arguing for original design appear in China's home-furnishing industry, and UBM Sinoexpo set up the DOD Exhibition (Design of Designers) to gather designers' work in one place. To some degree it is the furniture fair that gave the independent furniture brands of recent years their visibility, and carried more independent labels and independent designers into the market. Brands including Bentu, Ziinlife, Fnji, Yiwai Design and Benlai Design normally save their launches for the fair. Zhou Chenchen's Frank Chou Design Studio and Ruyi, the personal label of Yuan Yuan, formerly design director at QuMei Furniture, have both gone to exhibit at the Milan Furniture Fair — trips that carry a whiff of showing up simply to make a name. Apart from the pieces the two designers make to order for brands such as HC28 and Weixi, neither of their own labels has a formal sales channel yet, online or off.

On top of all this, the 2016 fair opened new ground: the "Modern Shanghai Fashion & Lifestyle Expo," at the World Expo Exhibition & Convention Center. If you are a consumer who has seen a few things, we suggest you skip it.

More than 300 home-accessory exhibitors fill halls N2, N5 and E7 at the Shanghai New International Expo Centre, but the quality is low — mostly small craft and accessory firms and workshops out of Guangdong, Zhejiang and Jiangxi. Call it a vast craft bazaar rather than a display of how to live.

Fenyate Art Co., from the Dafen Oil Painting Village in Shenzhen, ran a 40%-off sale during the fair; Yihe Ceramics, which came all the way from Jingdezhen, sold at 12% off. Its head told QDaily that ceramic merchants in Jingdezhen rarely come "to a fair this high-end," and that he had made the trip to find soft-furnishing designers to work with, or channels for customized gifts, and so widen the brand's routes to market.

UBM Sinoexpo, the curator, describes this year's shift "from furniture to the home" as "combining the strengths of the Paris home-decoration fair each January and the Milan Furniture Fair each April." In the words of Zhong Beihong, deputy general manager and director of the furniture division: "One becomes Shanghai's 'Milan fair,' the other Shanghai's 'Paris fair.'"

On the floor, that positioning is plainly a concept in search of substance. Perhaps out of a worry about falling behind, this year's fair was also keen on makers and smart homes, and invited 10 designers to mount themed installations — all of it gathered under the Home Plus lifestyle pavilion, which clearly ranks above the dining-table hall, the classical furniture hall, the office furniture hall and the outdoor furniture hall.

Because it tries to say so much, this year's fair comes out bland and cluttered. Read generously, the curator is reaching for the idea of a "lifestyle" — but the exhibitors who can actually show one are far too few to fill 350,000 square meters. For most of the rest, life appears to have no particular style at all.

Ten things we noticed at the 2016 China International Furniture Fair:

1. The popular DOD Exhibition doubled its exhibitor count — more booths, lower quality. The brands that brought surprises in past years, such as Ziinlife, Bentu, Xishan Workshop and Yiwai Design, were all but absent; the newcomers were mostly craft, lighting and furniture brands with interchangeable designs and nothing to distinguish them;

2. The DOD brands that used to anchor the zone with careful, inventive booths — Muzhi Workshop, Lost & Found, Fnji — saw their three or four booths cut to one or two, too small to work with, packed too tightly together, and lost the character of their displays;

3. This year's headline "Modern Shanghai Fashion & Lifestyle Expo" turned into a handicrafts show, which cannot carry the "whole home" idea it claims;

4. Outside the DOD Exhibition, the W4 brand design hall and the W5 original design hall, the great majority of halls still smell of the export trade — the goods mostly familiar copies, imitations and lightly reworked versions, packed in row on row, with the feel of a factory outlet;

5. Among home brands built on original design, wood remains by far the most common material, but there was less of the pure solid wood and solid-plus-panel construction of the past two years, and more mixing with other materials: mirrored stainless steel, resin, acrylic, fabric, cowhide and sheepskin, metal;

6. Two themed zones worked well — the Home Plus lifestyle pavilion and the China Style · New Chinese Classics Design Exhibition — mostly staged as scenes of home life; each curator worked in a different style, which brought some variety to the displays;

7. Large brands such as QuMei, Pingze and U+ showed little that broke new ground, mostly small changes in material or shape. Unless you asked a salesperson outright, old and new were hard to tell apart; these brands follow their own release schedules and rarely let it show in the booth;

8. The makers zone, with its smart-home and home-innovation teams and studios, was a bright spot. The build itself was inventive: every partition was furniture or structure made by digital fabrication. It was split roughly into a smart-home area, a digital-home area and a maker-space area, and gathered a good deal of clever smart-home hardware;

9. Children's furniture drew attention. The fair added a children's furniture hall this year, and in the DOD zone two brands, Suyuan and Shangxing, showed new lines made specifically for children;

10. There were more design events. The China Home Design Conference — Golden Dot Talks brought in Peter Zec, founder of Germany's Red Dot Design Award, for a keynote; 12 Shanghai shops including The Mix Place, both MUSIC&BOUTIQUE, Zhiguan Coffee and Liangshe staged a collective pop-up; there was the "Find China's Good Sofa · Find China's Good Fabric" competition series, and the "Heritage · Stand Up" exhibition of work brought back from Milan, among others.

Here is roughly what this year's booths looked like

Accessories area, Hall H2, "Modern Shanghai Fashion & Lifestyle Expo"

Booths at the China Style · New Chinese Classics Design Exhibition

Home Plus lifestyle pavilion, the "Life · Home" space by Sun Jianya

Home Plus lifestyle pavilion, the "Designers Don't Read" space by Ge Yaxi

Home Plus lifestyle pavilion, the "Jingwu" space by Xiao Aibin

Home Plus lifestyle pavilion, the "Ritual" space by Wu Bin

But beyond the themed shows and the designer zones, this is the bulk of the fair:

The "Heritage · Stand Up" exhibition of work back from Milan

Work from Zhou Chenchen's design studio

The booth of independent furniture brand Fnji at the DOD Exhibition

We also picked out some good new pieces from independent brands

1. Ruyi

Buyers keep reaching out to touch Ruyi's sofas, because they look so soft-edged. Alongside "Guan Shi" (Viewing Stone) and "Qing Shan" (Light Fan), the two pieces that won a China Red Star Design Award last year, Ruyi's most interesting product this year is "Wan Shi" (Playing With Stones).

The body of the "Wan Shi" sofa is nothing special; the cushions are. They come in a range of sizes, shaped and colored after pebbles from a riverbank, and the varied sizes let people of different builds share one sofa and each find the position that suits them.

The designer, Yuan Yuan, had a second reason for the name: she wants people to stop treating the cushions solemnly as backrests and start playing with them, with family and friends.

2. United Strangers

United Strangers is one of the odder things on show. It mixes leather and metal for an industrial look: a desk with one face of its drawers webbed in dark brown leather straps, the same treatment carried onto a bed's headboard. People may well find the style "unusual" — and next to "elegant," unusual is as far as it goes for now.

3. Shangxing

Shangxing came with children's furniture. The piece that had buyers pulling out their phones was a bed shaped like a biscuit. The designer, Yu Qing, says he built it to his own child's specifications: the boy had been nagging him for a long time for biscuit-shaped furniture, so this time he made him a small bed out of ash.

Shangxing's booth had a childlike touch too — bunting on the walls, little chairs with rabbit-ear cushions on the floor, bedside tables with rounded corners. The whole area felt lively.

4. Tiwu

Much of the lighting at the fair was elaborate. Glass and metal is still the standard pairing, but next to designs that bury the bulb under layers of perforated metal shades, Tiwu's plainness stands out. The cord on its teardrop pendant is brass rather than rope, yet the knot worked into it above the shade takes the hardness out of the metal.

5. FRANK CHOU DESIGN STUDIO

This is the personal label of Frank Chou, a young original designer who works in a modern, pared-down style. Each season he picks a different material as his theme rather than tying himself to one material or motif. This season it is wool felt: FRANK CHOU STUDIO built metal frames for its chairs and set wool-felt seat pads into them, which gives the pieces a cool but not cold reserve.

6. PINWU

QDaily has written about this design studio before; it is good at putting traditional crafts to modern use. Its space at this year's China International Furniture Fair was small, and it brought its handful of new pieces: a floor lamp made of bamboo paper, and a small table with a ceramic top.

Bamboo paper carries the grain of its plant fibers. The shade of this floor lamp is made entirely by hand and can be unfolded and smoothed flat; the frame is beech and comes apart. Because the paper is natural, no two shades have the same texture or the same ragged edge.

Hard ceramic set on beech gives this small table the coolness of the one and the warmth of the other. The ceramic is hard-wearing and easy to wipe clean, which makes the table more useful than it looks.

So — what do you make of it now?