“As a Designer, Before You Innovate You'd Better Be Clear How Much Good It Can Do for Society” | 100 People With Ideas

Designer Chen Min and some of his thinking.

Most people first heard of Chen Min because of a bamboo stool.

It is made of layered strips of bamboo veneer, each 0.9 millimeters thick and of a different length, 16 in all. The strips are glued together along the last 25 centimeters at either end, and a green bamboo pole about 3 centimeters across runs through the stack, tying the two ends of the stool together underneath. On top, the layers curve up into an arch on their own, like ripples spreading over a lake. Stacked that way, the bamboo springs: it holds a person's weight, and the heavier you are, the deeper you sink and the harder it pushes back. It feels the way his hometown, Hangzhou, feels — easy and free. So Chen Min called it the Hangzhou Stool.

The Hangzhou Stool made its debut at Milan Design Week in 2013 and won Best Seating Design at that year's EDIDA International Design Awards, run by the home and lifestyle magazine ELLE DECORATION. That is how Chen Min first drew notice. He was 33 that year, and had just opened his own studio.

In 2018 the stool was shortlisted for the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize, launched in 2017 by Loewe's creative director, Jonathan Anderson. The design world has never lacked awards of every kind, but international prizes for craft barely exist — this may have been the first. Thirty pieces reached the final round, picked from 2,000 works by craftspeople in more than 75 countries, and the Hangzhou Stool was the only one from China. That added to his halo: his work and his story were written up by design magazines including Wallpaper, Elle Decoration, ICON and AD, and ICON called him "currently the most talented homegrown designer in China."

The talent may well be real. Chen Min was born into a family of artists. His maternal grandfather was a printmaker and a former vice president of the China Academy of Art; his older uncle was once vice dean of the academy's design school, and his younger uncle vice dean of the school of architecture at Nanjing University. But Chen Min did not go into art, because in a family like that "what they expect of you is unusually high." His grandfather thought his drawing skills fell far short: "None of us in the third generation could carry on his line."

Choosing a major for the college entrance exam, he picked English, on the theory that a language is at least a tool. Had he stayed on that track and graduated from a foreign-languages department, he might be an English teacher now, or working in foreign trade. One conversation changed the route.

"If you had to design a piano, what would you do?" a German professor asked him, at a lecture at the China Academy of Art. Chen Min said he had wondered what would happen if a piano were transparent. At a concert you usually see only the pianist's hands moving; if the piano were clear, you could watch the keys strike, and perhaps you would see more. They kept talking for a long time after that.

Only later did he learn that the conversation had been an interview. Soon he received an invitation to study industrial design at the Köln International School of Design in Germany.

Until then, everything he knew about design came from the marker-pen renderings his uncle's students drew. He had seen the cars and spacecraft in The Art of Star Wars, the art-direction book for Star Wars: Episode I, thought they were tremendously cool, and started copying them, teaching himself marker technique. It was not until he reached Cologne in 2001 that he understood the point: design has essentially nothing to do with that kind of drawing.

His two years in Cologne were bleak. The school had no year groups, only credits. "That kind of avant-garde curriculum suits German culture, because their understanding of design runs deep. And how good is their industrial base?" Chen Min offered an example: over two weekends his roommate took a motorcycle apart — several thousand parts — and put it back together, and that roommate was studying graphic design. Chen Min was floored. Left to himself, he probably could not have stripped a computer and reassembled it. "Without a foundation you're building a castle in the air," a thought that unsettled him badly at the time.

So he applied to Design Academy Eindhoven, one of the best design schools in the Netherlands. The Dutch turned out to be nothing like the Germans. In Germany everything seemed to require doing things in the proper order, while "the Dutch are, on one hand, extremely conceptual — you can talk to an ordinary person about how the national art museum's building ought to be designed. On the other hand they're extremely shallow: they have a head for business, which is to say they're shrewd." Either way, four and a half years there put his design foundation on solid ground and made him see how much art matters to design.

Chen Min has a body of work called the Gong series, after the Chinese character gong, meaning "work" — a form shaped like an I-beam. He took that shape as a basic building block and combined it in different materials into a range of furniture, from tables and coffee tables to shelving systems. Gong was shown at Milan Design Week's Salone Satellite in 2012 and won the Jury's Special Prize at the 20th-anniversary Singapore Furniture Design Award in 2013. The idea grew out of his graduation project in the Netherlands, "Three-Dimensional Calligraphy."

The Hangzhou Stool came later, while he was taking a master's in design at Domus Academy in Milan. During the course a brand approached him and asked for a piece of furniture that broke new ground. The only material at hand was paper, so he experimented with a stack of it, and the shape of the stool emerged. Finding bamboo took another four years; before that he had considered sheet metal and plastic. Then came a new problem: how to industrialize it. Because of the complexity built into it, the Hangzhou Stool is still not a product, and Chen Min is still pushing to make it one.

"I'm unusually interested in structure, so I use materials — whatever medium I can get my hands on — to express my understanding of structure, and that structure works through movement. What I really want is to use the changes in a material itself to make a structure that can move," he says.

How to make tradition modern is a question he has never put down.

Issey Miyake is the designer he admires most. "I've never thought of him as a fashion designer. I think he's a superb industrial designer," Chen Min says. To his eye, Miyake's PLEATS PLEASE line uses fabric and cut in a thoroughly modern way and still looks Eastern. Miyake, along with Yohji Yamamoto and others, was also among the first Japanese designers to win recognition in the West.

For Chen Min, style is dead; what interests him is the design language behind an object. "Issey Miyake is speaking entirely his own language. There's no such thing as a fixed style. It doesn't have to be right angles or cut circles to be Issey Miyake."

The same thinking shows up in the y Bench series. He asked himself how to interpret a seat that carries the spirit of the Chinese bench, because as he sees it the Chinese bench is nothing like the Western one: smaller, freer, closer to daily life.

The answer was a modular furniture system, assembled from wood or bamboo strips in different sizes — tables, chairs, even beds can be built from the same structure.

Take the bench. Its surface is two bamboo boards, each 12 centimeters wide. "The 12 centimeters was calculated," Chen Min says. Narrower and it is uncomfortable to sit on; wider and material goes to waste, because a sheet usually arrives at 244 by 122 centimeters, and 12 centimeters uses that sheet most fully. The gap down the middle stays at 2 centimeters, which brings the whole surface to 26 centimeters — wide enough to serve as a flat top. The gap, meanwhile, opens up a space for accessories: a tray, a tea set.

"But most designers now tend to change only the outward shape, instead of thinking about how design can meet real needs in everyday life, and what the actual point of the innovation is," Chen Min says. "A couple of years ago Nordic design was hot, so you went and copied Nordic design. A couple of years later it isn't hot — so what happens to all that stuff? It's a waste of resources. When you make something, have you thought about how it gets recycled afterward? You can't only look after yourself. As a designer you ought to think about these things. Before you innovate you'd better be clear how much good the thing you make can do for society."

Chen Min says he has still never worked with ceramics, because he has not found an object he is sure would not waste resources. Once clay is fired into ceramic it is very hard to break down. "Think how much ceramic gets thrown out every year. How much land do we have left to bury it in?"

While studying in Milan he had already begun working with Italian brands, but that ran into the 2008 financial crisis: he did a great deal of design work and almost none of it went into production, and with no production a designer collects no commission. He also judged the European market long since saturated, with little room left, while China was full of openings. So he came home.

His studio, in Hangzhou's Yunqi Town, runs at about four or five people. Besides himself there are two full-time industrial designers, plus graphic and interior designers who work with the studio regularly. Satyendra Pakhale's studio in Amsterdam, where he spent a year, was the same size, and he took the model from there.

At any one time the studio has five or six commissioned projects running. Threaded through them is research he sets himself, which he then turns into proposals for brands — so another five or six self-directed projects run alongside.

Chen Min does not want his design boxed into one class of product; the studio's work covers furniture, products, lighting and interiors. He would also rather stay an independent designer than build a brand. "If you build a brand you have to think about the market, sales, after-sales service, and all your energy narrows down to that one small range," he says. "But I still want to keep exploring, to make the things I want to make. If you really want to get something done, be ready to give it 20 years — my mentor in the Netherlands told me that, and I've never forgotten it."

In the past two years he has also turned to traditional crafts. In early 2017 he joined the nonprofit Xihan Xingdong on a residency in Nanjing, visiting practitioners of gold foil, Yunjin brocade, mortise-and-tenon joinery and velvet flowers. Out of the joinery came a piece called Min's Chair. It keeps the character of a traditional Ming chair but brings in a modern three-way joint so the chair can be flat-packed.

"It feels Chinese, but in fact every detail of how it's made is Western — or say, the most modern way." Even so, Min's Chair cannot yet be fully flat-packed, because wood shifts with temperature and humidity while the three-way connectors Chen Min chose are metal, and joining the two to that degree of precision is still hard.

Later he went to Chengdu to learn about raw lacquer. The trip was organized by the baijiu brand Shui Jing Fang, which has set up a foundation for intangible cultural heritage. "Protecting crafts is a hot topic right now — the state is pushing it," Chen Min says. He visited the Chengdu Lacquerware Factory. In the early 1950s, craft factories like it were tasked with earning foreign exchange for the country through exports; today the factory is down from more than a thousand workers to 300. Many lacquer factories in coastal provinces such as Fujian and Zhejiang have closed or scattered, some carrying on as small workshops.

He found the material fascinating: scraped off the tree and made into natural lacquer, it is still alive thousands of years later, still breathing. What to do with it, he is still working out. For a designer, the question is how to pull a traditional craft that has lost its place in the world back into daily life.

This year Chen Min sat on the expert panel for the 2019 Loewe Craft Prize. Traditional craft, he has noticed, has drawn more and more attention over the past few years; abroad, craft art has become a discipline of its own. As he understands it, in 2012 the China Academy of Art took ceramics and tapestry out of the design category and moved them into a school of traditional crafts, separate from design.

As an industrial designer, Chen Min wants his work to be loose enough to fit into people's lives. His studio mostly makes small things, meant to go with whatever furniture people have already bought. They can sit anywhere — by the bed, in an entryway — and if they start taking up too much room they can be taken apart and put back together whenever they are wanted again. "I don't want to stress that this is my work, to make people remember me. I want to make something that blends into life, so you don't even notice it's there. But every time it helps you, you think: this thing really works."

Some people feel Chen Min has produced no signature piece since the Hangzhou Stool. He disagrees. "It's been ten years since the Hangzhou Stool. Give it a little more time and you'll see a lot more from me, and different."

All images in this article courtesy of Chen Min Studio