When Jack Wang (王維國) was growing up in Tianmu during the 1970s, one of his favorite pastimes was visiting yard sales held by his expatriate neighbors. At that time, many Taiwanese households still used traditional style furnishings built from carved redwood, a contrast to the items Wang saw.
“I’d take a look at their furniture and it was different from anything I’d ever seen before. I wondered why is American furniture different from Asian furniture,” remembers Wang.
Wang parlayed his curiosity into a hobby collecting vintage items, and then into a career. He has operated Uncle Jack’s, a vintage and antique home furnishings store in the East District, since 1991. Before that, Wang worked as a furniture wholesaler, importing items from the US and Europe. He still goes abroad at least once per quarter to hunt for furniture in southern California, Germany and France.
Photos: Catherine Shu, Taipei Times
In the early 1980s, Wang moved to Los Angeles to work for a manufacturing company. He spent his spare time combing flea markets and antique stores for his newest passion, vintage typewriters from the 1920s and the 1930s. As he researched the history of typewriters, he became interested in other items, including fountain pens.
“Your interests start expanding. You want to see what other things people were using during those eras,” says Wang. After amassing 100 vintage typewriters, Wang began collecting electric fans and then radios.
When Wang launched his business 20 years ago as an outgrowth of his hobby, he says the Taiwanese market for Western antiques and vintage items was still developing, in part because information and items had yet to become widely accessible through the Internet.
Photos: Catherine Shu, Taipei Times
“[Taiwanese consumers] didn’t really get to see these things. Everything was different, such as these electric fans and radios,” says Wang. “They’d want to know where it was made.” In addition to furniture, Uncle Jack’s also sells vintage kitchenware, home accessories and appliances like lamps and electric fans, which Wang keeps in working order at his in-store workshop.
Wang maintains longstanding business relationships with dealers in southern California, which enables him to skip flea markets, including the famous Rose Bowl Flea Market, where prices have jumped as vintage items become more expensive.
“It’s not a flea market anymore, it’s a tourist attraction. If you like something, there is no way you can sell it in Taiwan because of the price you’d have to charge,” says Wang.
Over the last two decades, a market has developed for Western-style vintage furniture in Taiwan, in particular modernist style items from the 1950s to 1970s. Wang’s favorite designers include Herman Miller, George Nelson, Carl Hansen and Charles and Ray Eames, all of whom are currently represented with pieces in Uncle Jack’s.
While mid-century designs sells the best at Uncle Jack’s, Wang enjoys hunting for items from the 1920s and 1930s. “A lot of the famous designers of the 1950s and 1960s came of age during that era. If you look at the designs, you can see the link between 1930s and 1960s pieces,” says Wang.
Wang relies on his decades of experience to distinguish genuine vintage items from newer pieces or knock-offs.
Eames molded plastic chairs, for example, have a marking engraved on the bottom of each seat. Indicators of age include the type of plastic or fiberglass used and whether or not the metal frame of the items is machine or hand welded. The chairs cost NT$20,000 to NT$30,000, with the price increasing for harder-to-find colors.
After a bad experience at the beginning of his collecting career, Wang became more cautious.
“I was tricked in France quite badly, when I bought something that turned out to be fake. It was a phonograph and the dealer told me it was from the 1920s,” says Wang. He didn’t find out that the item was a reproduction until a more seasoned collector told him it wasn’t authentic. “I was a beginner back then and I didn’t know anything. But you make mistakes and learn from them.”
A few of the items in the store are from Wang’s private collection and not for sale, including a studio light on a tripod frame from Hollywood and a collection of verdigris colored Frankoma pottery. Wang also has a taste for Murano glass (the store currently has an impressive chandelier made from dozens of glass drops in shades of golden brown for NT$26,000) and Louis Poulsen lighting fixtures.
“Poulsen is like an artist,” says Wang. “Each lamp is a work of art.”
Wang has eschewed an interior design career in order to focus on his retail business, but is contemplating offering “home organizing” services. The job would entail going into clients’ homes and making suggestions for how to arrange items they already own and adding one or two new pieces to achieve some flair without investing in a total rehaul. Wang says that mixing in vintage items with brand-new purchases keeps interiors from looking too sterile.
“If you use all new things, they look like samples. It doesn’t look like real life. You can’t keep things that pristine forever,” says Wang. “It’s good to have some unusual items mixed in, it creates a more comfortable atmosphere.”
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