Taiwanese designer and founder of the avant garde Dragonfly Design Centre, Jeff Shi is in town to speak at Business of Design Week. Shi is part of a growing group of Chinese contemporary designers who take their cues from traditional bamboo crafts and culture.
Although bamboo has been used in Taiwan for centuries, the number of craftsmen learning traditional techniques has dwindled in the past 30 years. In fact, the industry in Taiwan has declined, as most bamboo factories have relocated to the mainland. Shi hopes to reverse this trend.
Shi has just returned from a trip to the National Pingtung University of Science and Technology, one of the few universities in Taiwan that still offer courses in traditional carpentry. He was there to promote traditional bamboo-working techniques. Shi also held a Bamboo Project exhibition earlier this year, showing contemporary bamboo works by Taiwanese designers Chou Yu-jui, Chih-kang Chu, Chen Chun-hao and Chang Shih-wen.
He's not alone in his cause. Freeman Lau recently curated Rethinking Bamboo, an exhibition held at the First Beijing International Design Triennial in September and October this year. It showed 200 bamboo works from China and abroad.
For Shi, re-examining the past has led him to environmentally friendly products and processes. It has also helped to create a distinctly Chinese contemporary design language. From the way he talks, it is clear that the ideology behind his work is just as important as the products themselves.
'I'm trying to do something which has a positive influence on our own culture, and show the world there's a good, sustainable design solution from the Chinese,' he says. 'In my opinion, design and traditional crafts are all trying to resolve the problems of everyday life. But they had something different in the olden days; that is, they respected nature. I think that's a very important quality, and we need it. We have to use contemporary design concepts to revive those old techniques.'