Gewu Studio / Products and Spatial Experiments

A collaborative studio practice

This archive is drawn from Gewu Studio’s half-year report. It brings together five projects: Wave Pen, Tantan, Cornices, a screen for Phoenix Island in Sanya, and lighting for Beijing’s 768 Creative Park. As co-founder and artistic director, He Fa contributed to the studio’s creative direction, conceptual development, form studies and philosophical inquiry. Individual products and commissions are presented here as a collaborative studio archive.

Products: curves, repetition and generation

Wave Pen and Cornices turn continuous curves and layered structures into objects for use and wear. Tantan appears alongside them in the studio’s product series. Product photographs in the report make it possible to read these projects together with the contemporaneous Twelve Water Lamps.

Space: screens and light

The report also includes a screen designed for a Type A residence at Phoenix Island in Sanya and lighting for a venue in Beijing’s 768 Creative Park. The surviving images are design renderings. They record how curves and light were intended to enter architectural space; they do not establish completion of construction.

Credits and documentation

These products and spatial proposals are presented as records of the studio’s collaborative practice. He Fa’s work encompassed photography, conceptual development, form exploration and artistic direction. The making of the objects and authorship of their images are recorded separately.

Qingfeng Fuping: a view that changes with the body

The Qingfeng Fuping proposal designs a seascape screen for the entrance of a Type A show residence in the Phoenix Island business clubhouse, Sanya. It treats the entrance as a point where an interior view reaches the sea, connecting screen, home and seascape through looking. The proposal records an overall width of 2 m and height of 6 m, combining 55 distinct horizontal curved elements with a concealed straight framework.

The document also preserves form studies, three views of a single frame layer and a proposal for mortise-and-tenon assembly. As viewers change position, overlapping curves form different relationships. The document’s idea of “flow” refers both to the image of water and to the movement of a person.

Source documents: 清风拂屏, pp. 3, 6, 11, 14, 15, 16, 17, 20.

Ten names for Tantan

The studio’s Tantan naming draft develops ten homophonous or near-homophonous Chinese names: 弹弹, 忐忐, 探探, 叹叹, 昙昙, 坦坦, 檀檀, 潭潭, 谈谈 and 袒袒. Each links a disposition to a flower: 忐忐 connects shyness with begonia, while 潭潭 connects mystery with winter cherry blossom. The formal series thus also has a linguistic system built from sound, written meaning and botanical associations.

The draft documents the series’ naming concept and expressive method; it does not by itself establish production or exhibition details for all ten groups.

Source documents: 格物Tantan文案.

Jinhua Award medal and trophy proposal

The studio’s initial Jinhua Award proposal brings together a ploughshare, earth, sun and a V for victory. A transformed V frames the medal; the trophy develops that outline into curves and volumes seen from different directions. The nine-page document preserves two variants, four elevation renderings and a sequence of spatial studies through 360 degrees.

The document is credited to GEWU Studio, and the medal rendering is inscribed “2013.” This date belongs to the award inscription in the image; the initial draft provides no record of selection or completed production.

Source documents: 金铧奖——方案初稿, pp. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.