The exhibition space for Yii, the project art-directed by Gijs Bakker for the National Taiwan Craft Research Institute and shown at this year’s Milan Salone. The National Taiwan Craft Research Institute’s role is to revitalize traditional Taiwanese crafts. This year, the Institute showed 15 designs generated by fusing Taiwanese daily life with traditional crafts on the theme of ‘street life’ at the Triennale Design Museum.
The installation consisted of 190 10m transparent vinyl balloons, a choice that minimized waste as well as manufacturing and shipping costs and allows the installation to be reused at subsequent venues should the exhibition travel in future. Taiwan is home to many bamboo groves. We hoped to recreate their particular spatial elements and the feeling of standing amidst bamboo in our ‘grove’ in Milan. Sightlines and the character of the light change constantly as visitors walk between the balloons. We hoped that this would allow them to experience a kind of pleasant floating feeling as they viewed the exhibition, and be an appropriate spatial expression of the project’s aims to bring together ‘contemporary society and nature’ and ‘industry and craft’.