Kai Hsuan Chang (London Design Festival 2026)
This collection begins with wood veneer, an everyday material transformed through repeated acts of tearing, bending, folding and fixing.
Rooted in my long relationship with bentwood, the works move away from precision and function towards pressure, delay and resistance. As the wood splits, curves and holds tension, I consider how materials remember the forces they have endured.
For me, this process becomes a way to think about cultural redirection under external force: how identities, histories and landscapes can be altered, stabilised and eventually perceived as natural.
By materialising force, deformation and fixing, the collection makes visible how colonial assimilation naturalises ways of seeing, while concealing the pressures that produce them. The wood does not simply represent loss; it holds the trace of redirection. What appears curved, organic or quiet is also a record of force, transformation and survival.
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