24 Things Worth Seeing at This Year’s Design Shanghai — Most of Them Homegrown

If you have neither the time nor the patience for this “lively and crowded” design fair, here are the best bits.

By the second day of Design Shanghai, a long queue had already formed at the entrance to the Shanghai Exhibition Center. Opening-day attendance hit 10,237. The first two days were trade days, open only to industry professionals and press; the general public and students could come in on the 16th and 17th.

Even with the entry limits, the crush of people badly undercut the experience. Small booths were ringed several deep by visitors stopping to look, and in the bigger booths there was barely room to turn around once you were inside.

The fair’s popularity has kept climbing for two years now, and many design brands are happy to time their launches to it. From more than a thousand debuts we picked the 24 pieces most worth seeing. If you have neither the time nor the patience for a fair this aggressively “lively,” here are the best bits.

Most are brand-new launches, with a few crowd favorites mixed in. Bentu keeps pushing at what it can make concrete do; Ziinlife keeps breaking the image its customers have of it; the young brand WUU has moved into furniture for the first time; and the celebrated Japanese studio Nendo has brought work for Zens Living.

Xi / 2018, designed by Bentu

If you are listing independent design brands that can always find a new trick to play with concrete, Bentu belongs on it.

This year Bentu brought an outdoor range and wall-surface materials. The Xi / 2018 series includes wall-mounted planters and free-standing planters in a range of sizes, cast from concrete mixed with recycled construction-waste aggregate.

Raw cement gray is a clean color, and at first glance it looks cold and hard. But think about what these are for — holding flowers and greenery, sitting among other furnishings — and the look turns out to be ideal: steady, easy to combine with anything, the kind of object that grows on you.

Frame / 2018, designed by Bentu

This set of floor lamps, called Frame, belongs to the same 2018 outdoor range. The lamp frames are cast in raw-gray concrete with recycled construction-waste aggregate; the lines are solid and clean, the geometry emphatic.

The team did warn us that Frame is fussy about where it goes. It suits outdoor public spaces that already have wiring buried underground; for home use, you have to lay the cable in your garden or yard first. Cold cement against warm light makes for a striking thing to have outside.

Impromptu Sofa & Impromptu Chair, designed by Ziinlife

Judging by its last two collections, the homegrown brand Ziinlife has been trying to break out, dropping the warm, cute, fresh-faced image it used to have for a richer and more varied design language. The designer told us that this spring’s 2018 collection, “Wonderful Balance,” may look like a set of visual games but was worked out with practicality firmly in mind.

Take the Impromptu Sofa. It looks like something dashed off in a flash of inspiration: two plain flat planes slotted through each other, and the whole structure feels weightless. The Impromptu Chair from the same series folds two-dimensional planes into a three-dimensional form — nimble and clever. The backrest extends into an armrest on one side, the seat into an armrest on the other, and the three pieces slot together so that each answers the others.

Xianting Lamp, designed by Ziinlife

Another piece from Ziinlife’s spring collection, with a fine mechanical feel and a thoroughly modern look. The Xianting Lamp borrows the form of a pendulum, swinging between balance and imbalance: the slender stem pivots around the axis of the base. The base is stable and handsome, an arc shaped like a crescent moon, and a strong magnet hidden inside keeps this very simple structure permanently poised.

AXIS Side Table, designed by WUU

This is the fourth year the independent home brand WUU has come to Design Shanghai. Under the theme “A SENSE OF TIMELESSNESS,” it showed work across three categories — lighting, everyday objects and furniture. It is also WUU’s first move into furniture.

AXIS is the first piece in that furniture line, offered in two sizes and two tabletop materials. Every part of the body is machined from a single block of aluminum, and it feels solid and settled. Anodizing gives the surface a fine finish to the eye and the hand. The marble version sets the softness of stone against the hardness of aluminum.

QUARK Pendant Lamp, designed by WUU

True to its name, QUARK is meant as the basic unit of light in a room: use one, or group several. Touch the switch on the body to set the brightness. The shape is plain and legible, the surface round and finely finished.

Angle Ruler, designed by Yiwai Design

This is the star item in the “Designer’s Gifts” line from the independent brand Yiwai Design. It is not new this season, but it draws a crowd — and it won a product design award at the 2018 Red Dot Awards.

It overturns a lot of assumptions about what a ruler is, folding a straightedge, a parallel ruler and a protractor into one object. Two rulers hold together with a magnet and an iron plate, a slide track sets the direction, and the whole thing comes apart in two or joins back into one with no effort.

The front carries the usual 20-centimeter markings. The back carries something genuinely useful to a graphic designer: a reference chart of type sizes and line weights.

New Time-Series Fountain Pens, designed by Yiwai Design

Yiwai Design’s Time series has matured, and this time the designers added new pens to it. To the original trio of materials — solid wood, brass and cowhide — they have added marble, which gives the grain more depth.

Combo Sofa, designed by FRANK CHOU DESIGN STUDIO

The new pieces from FRANK CHOU DESIGN STUDIO (Zhou Chenchen Design Studio) start from “space, time and light” and run under the theme Timeless Sculpture in the Home.

The sofa called Combo takes several of the most characteristic techniques in the history of hand-upholstery and remakes the “classic” with modern methods through playful modular assembly. In the designer’s words, this lively, bold assembly has the drama of a “combo” in a video game and the odd, pleasing rhythm of a “small band.”

Stack Side Table, designed by FRANK CHOU DESIGN STUDIO

Another new side table from Frank Chou Design Studio this season. The designer calls it less a piece of furniture than a sculpture that happens to stand in a room. The staggered tabletops and the rectangular supports are worked as a “three-dimensional composition,” which gives the table its particular bulk and its artistic character.

Kirstie van Noort × 2016/, designed by Rongji

The design brand Rongji invited the Dutch designer Kirstie van Noort to study the raw materials behind Arita porcelain. The ceramics she made with 2016/ come in warm earth tones and as white plates with graded color — and you would never guess that these gentle objects begin with discarded black ore, as both inspiration and ingredient.

She ground the black ore into powder, mixed it with white kaolin, developed a new clay from it and threw a set of tableware. Fired, the clay turns a warm earth color. She then worked on new natural glazes: sand and iron mixed in different proportions give different colors.

The finished work falls into two series. One is in earth tones, made from the clay she developed by mixing black ore with base ore; the even earth color is the clay’s own, with no added dye. The other keeps the traditional white ground but uses the new natural glazes, sprayed on with an airbrush to produce gradients.

Linglong Porcelain Series, designed by Yiyang Yisheng

The new Linglong porcelain series that Ran Xiangfei brought this time is a set of vessels in different sizes. The trick is in the body: openwork carving cuts a pattern of regular “linglong eyes,” and after glazing and firing those holes become translucent points of light. The new pieces use several different hole patterns, and with a light inside, the play of light and shadow makes the porcelain look even more transparent.

Moon Shadow Lamp, designed by Camino

Camino is Spanish for “road,” and this American home-design brand mixes styles — Nordic plainness above all, blended with American vintage design.

The Moon Shadow Lamp uses a spare Western design language to say something Eastern about home. It comes from the young Taiwanese designer Vii Chen, who was homesick while studying abroad. Metal wire blurs the light source, so that looking at it is like seeing the moon through a window — a haze you want to stare into. As a lamp it both lights a room and sets a mood; as a screen it cuts the view in two.

Iceland, Sérénité, Great Wave and Tarsila series, designed by Minimaïst

The designer Qian Qingtong, named China’s Best Design Newcomer in 2017, founded the brand Minimaïst. She brought four collections to the fair: Iceland, the Sérénité holiday series, Great Wave, and Tarsila, new for 2018.

Her booth was designed by the architects Buschmeyer + Cai. Minimaïst’s idea is to move nature indoors, and the architects wanted these objects shown inside the nature that shaped them, even in so small a space. The whole stand is a model of a stretch of rolling coastline in southern Iceland, abstracted step by step into a fragment of nature held still — a stand that talks back to the Iceland and Tarsila collections.

Aoyama Series, designed by ZAOZUO

Shuhei Aoyama, the Japanese designer with a large following in China, has taken on furniture for the first time, making the Aoyama series for the home brand ZAOZUO.

He worked from a 7-2-1 rule about how often things get used, giving the most-used items open shelving, and thought through the storage each part of a home needs. The result is a whole-house system — wardrobes, sideboards, bookshelves, entryway cabinets, TV units, shoe cabinets and nightstands — with flexible add-on modules that yield 57 combinations.

YUAN Series Clothes Rack, designed by URBANCRAFT

URBANCRAFT is an independent home brand founded in 2016 by the designer Li Ximi, formerly chief designer at Neri&Hu.

The YUAN series covers clothes racks, side tables, mirrors and lamps. This rack brings together three materials — brass, walnut and cowhide. A brass frame carries a wooden hanging rod and a tray at the bottom; cowhide links the rod to a brass ring for scarves; the wooden tray lifts out and can be used on its own.

by 3 cabinet/coffee table system, designed by URBANCRAFT

This modular TV unit is URBANCRAFT’s other new piece, and the mix of terrazzo, aluminum, other metal and wood comes out looking sharp and current. Put it together as a TV unit, or use the parts separately as a coffee table or a side table.

Magnet & Paperweight, designed by Jiannanhua

Besides the tiles themselves, Jiannanhua, which makes handmade cement tiles, has been turning out spin-offs: the bookends we have written about before, and the Magnet and the Paperweight it brought to the fair. All are attempts to put cement tile back to use.

The raw material is mostly broken corners left over from making the tiles by hand, wrapped afterwards in brass. The Paperweight will hold down light objects, or serve in a pinch for self-defense. The Magnet sticks to a refrigerator or an iron pipe and looks rather good there.

Silo clock, designed by Beyond Object

Beyond Object, a British brand working on desktop objects, household accessories and personal accessories, brought its best-known piece, the Silo clock. It has no dial: you place the 12 markers wherever you like and rearrange them at will.

Silo’s hour and minute hands are in fact two incomplete triangles, and the shape they make together keeps changing as time passes — a quiet thing to lose yourself in.

ALIGN Off-Axis Pen, designed by Beyond Object

What you notice first about the ALIGN pen is that a section of the barrel sits out of line. The designers noticed that people cannot leave things unaligned, and used that to prompt the user to twist the offset section straight — which pushes out the refill and turns the pen into a pen. You then discover that once the refill is out and the second section lines up, the third section is out of line again. The offset also means the pen sits still on a desk instead of rolling, open or closed.

Birdsong Vessels, designed by Zens Living

The home brand Zens Living moved “Village of Wonders” — the booth the Japanese studio Nendo designed for it at the Paris home-decor fair — to Design Shanghai. It cuts up an already small space further: the display shelves become irregular little white houses arranged into a village, and the objects on show become the villagers.

The Birdsong vessels are Nendo’s work too, and come from the sight of birds perched on power lines. Stands built on the themes of “trees” and “power lines” hold containers of different sizes, so that the whole thing reads as birds large and small settling on the wires.

Character Riddle Series, designed by Zens Living

Also by Nendo. It works with points and lines — geometric elements that carry both structure and stability — and takes its shapes from the radicals and components that are the building blocks of Chinese characters. Putting that script into small everyday furniture answers Zens Living’s theme of Eastern living.