Knock on wood: Artist explores acts of creation

One quiet afternoon in her studio, wood crafting artist Hua Yong found herself watching water boil. Instinctively, she reached for her phone and refreshed the screen. In that fleeting moment, she realized how much modern life is consumed by speed.

"We are completely swept up by this hyper-fast rhythm," she says. "It's becoming harder to find time to unwind amid the everyday chaos of life."

Hua, the 2024 recipient of the Hand of Wisdom prize, a Sino-French crafts exchange program, spent two months in Paris last year, a rare stretch of uninterrupted time that allowed her to reflect on the act of creation.

She began experimenting with simple geometric forms, rotating and repeating them to create visual rhythms that seemed to transcend time and space. "I thought about how to create something new from nothing, and used the highest standards of traditional Chinese craftsmanship to bring these ideas to life," she says.

Hua, 42, returned to her roots, literally. Working with materials like purple sandalwood, she designs and crafts screens, cabinets, tea tables, and tall tables using mortise-and-tenon joints and labor-intensive hand-polishing.

"Woodcrafting requires the sedimentation of time," she notes. Her solo exhibition Changing the World in Silence at Yishu 8 — an art platform housed in the former Sino-French University in Beijing — marks the culmination of a year's reflection and making. Running through mid-June, the show features 25 pieces, 11 of which she created after her Paris residency.

"I hope these tangible forms can guide viewers to sense the vastness of the intangible: to experience the beauty of the world in stillness amid the noise," she says.

The precision in Hua's work is remarkable. "We select dense, flawless, secondary hardwoods, and the raw materials undergo a six-month acclimatization process to reach a stable state," she explains.

The structures are measured with vernier calipers to a tolerance one-tenth of a hair's width, and sanded dozens of times using 800 to 5,000 grit, with water to achieve a jade-like finish.

Among the works is the Liquid Eternity series, a jewelry box with a sculptural, wave-polished lid. "Furniture and objects are like sculptures in the living space," Hua says. "We hope they quietly accompany the user, subtly influencing and transforming their experience."

A table from the Vortex Mirage series links two polygonal surfaces in slight misalignment, creating a vortex-like visual effect. It draws the viewer's mind into a different dimension, "a brief mental escape and a moment of relaxation", describes Hua.

A graduate of Tsinghua University's Academy of Arts and Design, Hua has long studied traditional furniture techniques. She founded her brand in 2013 to explore how contemporary design and classical hardwood craftsmanship coexist.

Su Dan, artistic director of Hand of Wisdom and deputy director of the China National Arts and Crafts Museum in Beijing, sees in Hua's work a "structural aesthetic".

"She has long engaged with traditional materials, creating a vast vocabulary of wooden forms," he says.

Since Hua's return from Paris, Su has observed a shift: "The changes in her work's form between movement and stillness are projections of conceptual unrest.

"Designers are constantly thinking. Works created in such a state of reflection become models of design philosophy: They are fleeting, yet eternal."