CONTEMPORARY AND RETRO SEATING

Despite the power and elegance of traditional Ming and Qing style furniture, and the ways in which it can complement modern interior spaces, there is plenty of scope for using newer designs to accentuate and even carry a particular design style. With relaxing and unwinding being now such important features of home life, the sofa assumes a new significance, and contemporary sofas are designed to combine some features of the couch, the chaise longue and the daybed. Unlike the sofa’s role in creating comfort and luxury, chairs have tended to be designed by reviving traditional Chinese themes and putting a contemporary twist in them, either playfully or with a view to more functionality. They are more and more the outcome of explorations into how art and design can be inserted successfully into the best aspects of traditional Chinese culture, at the same time keeping everything firmly within a modern context. In this sense, many of these chairs can be regarded as sculpture or conceptual art, while maintaining their function as furniture. On the following two pages we can see another trend, which is to revive the increasingly popular Shanghai Art Deco and other styles from the twentieth century. Adopted Western styles from the 1920s through to the 1950s have themselves acquired a Chinese aura, by adaptation and by the contexts in which they have been seen and used.

Chinese themes inspire contemporary furniture in Pearl Lam’s Hong Kong house, including a white upholstered throne chair by Mark Brazier-Jones and embroidered and jeweled lampshades by Franck evennou.

An armchair converted by Shao Fan from an antique tibetan chest and upholstered in sheepskin. In front is a tibetan tiger rug.

A Qing open-back daybed upholstered in zebra stripe fabric, with black and white versions of Beijing artist Sui Jian Guo’s fiberglass ‘Mao Jacket’.

A white-painted wooden slatted chair designed by Yu Yongzhong of Banmoo.

‘YinYang’ chair-stools designed by Harrison Liu. The same basic construction, inspired by yin and yang duality, is used for the table on page 39.

A contemporary steel interpretation of a Ming spindle-back chair.

Reproduction 1930s shanghai leather-upholstered seating. Above hangs a 2009 ‘neck’ painting using real hair by French artist christian de Laubadere.

In the restored Mullinjer House in shanghai, bespoke de gournay wallpaper is based upon seventeenth-century Western paintings depicting chinese landscapes. Portraits of the owners and their architect have been added to one of the garden scenes.

A 1930s shanghai leather sofa and armchairs at the Kee club, a private members’ club housed in the twin Villas, a neoclassical property on Huaihai Road.

A reclining colonial chair on the landing of the Mullinjer house in shanghai.

A 1940s armchair upholstered in green fabric with a contrasting red cushion, below a shanghai cigarette poster from the 1930s.

A pair of 1930s black leather armchairs and a nineteenth-century chinese chest in an apartment conversion in the famous 1934 Hamilton House, near the Bund in shanghai.