Contemporary Nordic Design Exhibition at He Xiangning Art Museum

HIAP is the Finnish partner in realising the Contemporary Nordic Design Exhibition at He Xiangning Art Museum in Shenzhen, China. The exhibition features designers from Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark and aims to challenge the stereotypes associated with Nordic design.

The Finnish section features the work of three designer duos: Kivi Sotamaa & Tuuli Sotamaa (Ateljé Sotamaa), Laura Juslin & Lilli Maunula (Juslin-Maunula) and Sami Niemelä (Nordkapp) & Simone Rebaudengo (automato.farm).

Ateljé Sotamaa will present Ultima, a restaurant in Helsinki which offers an extraordinary setting for people to reflect on their habits and relationship to food and nature. Ultima opens up questions about how food is produced and to what extent we should interfere with processes of nature by present-day technology.

Juslin-Maunula’s installation Glass Brick Facade is a sculpture, but also an edition of design objects, as well a stage-like setting that encourages the audience to move around in the space. Juslin-Maunula explores in a playful way the potential of using the conventions and language of architecture and spatial design in fashion, and vice versa.

Sami Niemelä’s and Simone Rebaudengo’s project Made in Machine investigates our relationship to today’s product manufacturing industry. To what extent is the product design industry today driven by banal market speculation algorithms and serving only short-sighted vanity?

The exhibition’s chief curator is Feng Boyi. The Finnish section is curated by Ian Yang, Juha Huuskonen and Miina Pohjolainen (assistant curator). Other curators of the exhibition are Bjørn Inge Follevaag (Norway), Chen Shuyu (Sweden), Erlend Høyersten (Denmark) and Wang Xiaosong (symposium and catalogue).

The exhibition is open 1 Dec 2018 – 3 March 2019.