With watches made from cement, furniture fashioned from factory pipes, and accessories created from motorbike leather, Taiwanese designers are winning new fans at home and abroad with their own brand of industrial chic.
The style reflects the nation’s sprawling cities and aims to breathe new life into mundane materials more often found on building sites or in workshops. Jewelry and watchmaker Sean Yu uses concrete for his products, starting out by making rings from the material. After experimenting with different types of concrete, he now uses a mix similar to the formula used to construct buildings.
His latest top-selling item is a mechanical watch with a concrete surface in the shape of a spiral staircase. It launched last year and set a sales record on crowd-funding website Zeczec, raising over NT$12 million in pre-orders. Yu says his style is inspired by acclaimed Japanese architect Tadao Ando, known for his masterly use of concrete.
Photo: AFP
“I design for myself and for like-minded people who are avant-garde and rebellious, and who like novel things,” Yu said. “What attracts me most about concrete is that when you treat an ordinary material well, you can deliver new values.”
His products are also on sale in Britain, Japan and the United States. Plumber-turned-interior designer Daniel Cheng uses iron piping to create everything from lights to shelves and sofa frames. Cheng branched out into furniture design when he was seeking to expand his business and also uses steel bars, tires, truck wheel rims and car seats for his creations. “My inspirations are simple. I was a plumber and it’s something I worked with everyday,” he said. “I want to use my imagination to make something interesting and meaningful.”
Cheng says most of his clients order custom-made products, with local celebrities among his fans, as well as businesses that have hired him to decorate restaurants, cafes and clothes shops.
Ginger Chang of the Taiwan Design Center, which promotes local designers and brands, said the industrial look featuring cement, brass, aluminum and granite is increasingly popular as an interior design trend on the island.
“The public like fresh things and they are looking for something special in terms of materials. They like the one-of-a-kind feel,” Chang told AFP.
Consumers are also drawn by a green element to some of the industrial chic products. Balance Wu says he wants to prevent motorcycle seat-pads and scrap leather from ending up as garbage, so uses them to create wallets, bags and accessories. There’s no shortage of material — Taiwan’s cities are clogged with mopeds — and Wu’s creations are now sold in design shops from Taipei to New York.
“Motorcycle leather is a humble and durable material that has to withhold wind, rain and sun every day,” says Wu, who co-designs the products with his wife Chin Yang.
“We are turning this durable material into products that can be used for a long time.”
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist