Table of contents for Issue 10 in Design Anthology, Asia Pacific Edition

If you’re no stranger to Taipei, you’ll already be familiar with the Fujin Tree lifestyle brand that helped put the Songshan neighbourhood firmly on the city’s map of charms. Admired for its low-rise buildings and tree-lined residential streets dotted with parks and community gardens, the area grew in popularity thanks in large part to the assortment of lifestyle boutiques, shops, cafes and restaurants established by the group over the years. Their latest offering comes in the form of Oyster Bar. Working again with Jeng Shihchieh Design — the creative team the Fujin Tree group has collaborated with on many of its other spaces — the group created Oyster Bar with the outdoors in mind, as it did with the adjacent Taiwanese Cuisine & Champagne. Full-height folding doors open up to…

Any visit to Taiwan would be incomplete without visiting a tea house, where ritual and tradition dominate the atmosphere and menu descriptions read like poetry. Here’s just one: The tea infusion is exquisitely full and gracefully elegant; its fragrance is pure and fresh, delicate and ethereal. It makes one feel immersed in the light mists of a deep mountain on a spring morning, in great nature’s most tranquil and pure, abundant and rich forest breath. According to a Taiwanese friend, tea and love go hand in hand. ‘It makes sense,’ she explained. ‘You drink tea, you feel all warm inside and it makes you think of love.’ The Taiwanese seem to have a wonderfully romantic outlook on life. Here, Design Anthology is delighted to present a beautiful photo essay by…

In 2015, curator Jiayin Chen won an open call by the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, which resulted in her first show of contemporary media art. The Real Thing explored the definition of reality through the works of seven rising international artists. Her curatorial statement posed an intriguing question: ‘If reality were a carpet, what would be underneath it?’ Chen, who resides between Taipei and New York City, is also editor-in-chief of SCREEN, an online art magazine that defines its subject as ‘time-based works' and includes video, film, audio and software-based installations, and lens-based works such as photography and moving images. It was a natural choice to focus on media art. ‘Video is something that we grew up with, and we use the internet and computers every day,’ says…

         Next year will mark the 30th anniversary of Jamei Chen’s fashion studio. The designer, who first moved to Taipei as a window display designer, was brought up in a nature-loving, thrifty environment in a traditional courtyard house surrounded by the Puli countryside. ‘My days were filled with music from the chirping of birds, swaying of leaves and the sound of my mother’s sewing machine clicking away,’ she recalls. Chen’s days were absorbed by creating matching outfits for her paper dolls and looking forward to the clothes her mother would make for her. Today, she has grown her fashion brand to a 60-employee enterprise working across 12 stores in Taiwan, one in China’s Suzhou and another soon to open in Shanghai. Recognised for couture that strikes a balance between elegance,…

Taiwan is experiencing something of a construction boom with several high-profile, blockbuster cultural developments led by renowned international architects. One of the most inspiring is the Taipei Performing Arts Centre by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, known to most as simply OMA. Comprised of three theatres connected to a central cube that houses the stages and support spaces, the structure transforms the traditional performance centre vernacular with an unusual multi-purpose venue. The scheme, due for completion early next year, will be the international firm’s first performing arts centre designed on Taiwanese soil; it represents a significant architectural breakthrough with a design that transcends the traditional format of theatres, explains OMA managing partner David Gianotten. ‘Performing arts centres need to provide good,usable and technical spaces for the traditional performing arts, but…

B&B Italia, Taichung Innovative Italian furniture maker B&B Italia has opened a third monobrand store in Taiwan with its recent launch in Taichung, the country’s third-largest city. The 800-square-metre space is located in a new luxury mall, and spreads out over two floors; it will encapsulate the brand’s entire offering of indoor and outdoor furniture collections, with the ground level dedicated to B&B Italia and the upper level entirely to Maxalto. Both residential and contract divisions of the brand are represented, with an experienced team servicing local architects, interior designers and property developers. bebitalia.com Kedai Bikin, Kuala Lumpur Malaysian lifestyle brand Kedai Bikin, which launched in 2013, has opened a second showroom in Kuala Lumpur. The design duo behind the furniture and home accessories collection, Farah Azizan and Adela Askandar…

Works from a few of our favourite young Taiwanese designers…

Ingredients are a language; where they are from and how they are used gives chefs the power to let us travel via our plates. As well, the importance of place for chefs is central, though it can mean very different things. For some, place is rigorous and confined: defined by the walls of the restaurants they work in and the relationship to ingredients defined by a list on a clipboard. For others, place influences a whole gastronomic language and creative process.The increasing importance of provenance, and curiosity towards native ingredients, have made places and their cultures a defining part of the creative process and expanded the geography of the palate. This thread continues to run through gastronomic culture. In recent years many chefs have continued the tradition of ‘staging’ in…

Much of the hour-long drive inland from Taichung in western Taiwan is guarded by a procession of verdant crags, winding roads and tunnel upon tunnel carved directly through the limestone mountainside. And then, as if a veil has been lifted, a spectacular expanse of water appears, stretched out before us. A majestic pagoda is visible, perched high above and secluded on the opposite shore. The teal-blue waters of Sun Moon Lake are calm and inviting today. Downy white clouds float above the surrounding peaks, boats bob gently, day-trippers angle for the right shot and the shrill buzzing of cicadas pierces the air. On past the small township of Yuchi we drive, up a short winding road to arrive at our destination: The Lalu. Sun Moon Lake, Taiwan’s largest and most…

     Modest though not austere, modern yet timeless, Taiwanese interior design studio HAO Design’s residential projects showcase rough industrial materials in a warm and welcoming way. Since Ivan Chen established the studio in his home town of Kaohsiung three years ago, HAO Design has become known for renovations that are not so much defined by a particular aesthetic as they are by their deft manipulation of material, light and space. ‘A good space is not necessarily luxurious,’ says Chen. ‘Within our designs, you can see a better lifestyle and feel the warmth in the interiors — but it is people that complete the whole story and experience the interiors.’ It’s unsurprising then that a young couple, bequeathed a 30-year-old house and about to embark upon married life, chose HAO Design…

Drive out past the city limits and begin the precipitous ascent into the mountains that swaddle Taipei. Leave your scooter behind and trudge up a hardscrabble slope through the jungle vines and undergrowth that crowd out a now-obscured footpath. Upon cresting the ridge, an intriguing black tubular structure stretches out before you — and as you enter into the space, it’s like nowhere you’ve been before. Its purpose? A laboratory of primitive senses. The spirit child of local studio Divooe Zein Architects, Siu Siu Lab of Primitive Senses is in equal parts unusual and extraordinarily special. Originally conceived of as a cat sanctuary for the strays that roam the alleyways of Taipei, the project faced a slight setback when a proportionate number of wild dogs were discovered to roam the…

             Eugene Yeh is a man who loves stories. Old stories of a more romantic, sepia-toned past when men wore three-piece linen suits and homburgs to lunch and women dressed in cheongsams, and the soundtrack of people’s lives clicked with mah-jong tiles and the dulcet tones of Yang Xiao Ping and Chang Hsiu-ching. It’s a vintage aesthetic that informs the interior designer’s favourite spaces and projects — in particular, his four-storey townhouse in Taipei. ‘I bought this place in 2002 from the architect who had built it in 1961, the year I was born. It was simple and very boxy, which I liked,’ says Yeh. Under his watchful supervision, the top-to-toe renovations, conducted to his own designs and exacting specifications, took six months. ‘It was day and night,’ recalls Yeh,…

A student unlocks a YouBike at a train station. The CEO of one of the world’s largest bicycle manufacturers circumnavigates the sweet potato-shaped island. A family on recumbent bikes enjoys an afternoon along the river. This is bicycle culture today in Taiwan, Asia’s self-proclaimed ‘Cycling Paradise’. Bicycles were once common transport across Asia. As recently as the 1980s, streets in Beijing, Shanghai and Hanoi were dominated by pedalling masses. By the 1990s, however, economic growth, rapid urbanisation and the aspirations of an emerging middle class saw bicycles widely replaced by the status promised by mopeds and cars. These motorised options continue to provide transport for the rising classes, while public transport struggles to meet demand. In an attempt to correct this imbalance, cities such as Guangzhou, Bangkok and Singapore have…

As civil war swept across China and the Nationalist Party began to lose its footing, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek made a prescient decision. Crate by crate, the most valuable treasures of Peking’s Forbidden City were evacuated across the Formosa Strait on overloaded cargo ships bound for safekeeping in Taiwan. While a mere 22 per cent of the original repository was salvaged, at more than 700,000 artefacts it represents no small feat, so much so that today only one per cent of the collection is ever exhibited at any given time for visitors to the National Palace Museum in Taipei. A newly unveiled second location, however, promises to expand the exhibition space while adding an architectural dimension and drawing culture vultures to Taiwan’s South. The new National Palace Museum Southern Branch…