It's been three years since a ragtag bunch of graduates interested in "upcycling" discarded materials formed the Cave Creative Workshop. Now the seven-member collective is a regular fixture on Hong Kong's design scene, with its furniture pieces stocked by local store Signed-By and its giant wood installations taking centre stage at the Detour art and design festival for the past two years. Cave co-founder Brandon Chan Pak-kin, 26, tells us about the collective's evolution.
"We started the Cave Creative Workshop in 2010, which is the year we graduated from college. Six of us were classmates at the Caritas Bianchi College of Careers. We all studied design - interior design, fashion design and graphic design. We said, 'Hey, let's do something,' but we didn't have any plans. We just found a space in Kwun Tong and rented it."
"The reason we started doing furniture and upcycling is that we needed some tables and chairs [for the office] but we didn't have any money. So we looked around Kwun Tong, where there is a lot of waste from the industrial area; we gathered all of it and tried to use it; wooden pallets, tables with broken legs, that sort of thing. We found this process interesting so we kept doing it."
"We're working on a lot of different projects. Lots of furniture, but also music video production, installation art, booth design for exhibitions. RTHK is filming a documentary on us. We also have regular workshops where people can come, pay a little money and we'll help them make chairs, stools or boxes with recycled material."
