A Place to Pause, A New Way to Encounter Art
Jacky Tsai × Mao Hua / PP Design Gallery — Art Benches, Shenzhen
01st Dec 2023
Shenzhen Museum of Contemporary Art and Urban Planning
For his Shenzhen museum exhibition A Journey of All and None, Jacky Tsai collaborated with designer Mao Hua and PP Design Gallery to create a series of nine art benches. Distributed through the exhibition’s different areas, these specially conceived pieces brought the artist’s imagery into the spaces where visitors could pause, sit and spend time with the work.
The project offered another way to encounter Tsai’s art. A bench could be part of the view, a place from which to look, and an artwork experienced through use. Across the exhibition, the seating established a quieter rhythm between the larger works and installations.
Art within reach
The collection brings together restrained forms and richly worked surfaces. Chinese visual traditions meet contemporary imagery through colour, pattern and craft, while the familiar scale of furniture gives these ideas an immediate physical presence.
A colourful art bench in the exhibition’s pink gallery.
The art benches in use, surrounded by works from the exhibition.
A shared language of art and design
Mao Hua, founder of EK Design and PP Design Gallery, shares Tsai’s interest in moving between art and design. Their collaboration explores how an artwork can retain its individuality while becoming something people live with and use.
Among the series, Rock Carving (开石) combines stone and wood with stained veneer and shell inlay, incorporating Tsai’s “General Tsai” figure. Other designs explore blue-and-white motifs, flowing colour and the subtle presence of pattern on dark surfaces.
Overhead view: two separate art benches placed side by side, their imagery combining to form a complete floral skull.
Figurative imagery and blue-and-white ornament, seen in detail.
The collaboration’s signature, engraved into the edge of a bench.
A different arrangement of the benches leads the eye through the gallery.
A pause becomes part of the exhibition
Seen beside paintings and installations, the benches connect the scale of the visitor’s body with the scale of the surrounding exhibition. They invite a longer stay: a moment to notice a detail, change a viewpoint or continue a conversation.
Presented at the Shenzhen Museum of Contemporary Art and Urban Planning in 2023, the project extends Tsai’s practice into functional art furniture, carrying his visual world beyond the image and into everyday experience.
Blue-and-white art benches arranged around a circular work in the gallery.
Art bench design: Jacky Tsai & PP Design Gallery, in collaboration with Mao Hua
Exhibition: A Journey of All and None, Shenzhen Museum of Contemporary Art and Urban Planning, 2023
Further reading
INTERNI 设计时代 — 功能与艺术的碰撞
EK Design — 藏在九把长凳里的纷繁万象
gooood — A Journey of All and None