Gatherings | Into the Wood: Eighteen Years, Inch by Inch

On 12 September 2026, in the Yedao cultural community in Huizhou, UENO Living Gallery, the new second-phase space of UENO Bookstore, opened its doors. The day also marked BDSD's seventh year.

As its opening exhibition, the gallery and Dak Haan presented Into the Wood (入木), the first solo exhibition by Dak Haan founder Zhou Anbin, covering eighteen years of his key furniture, from 2008 to 2026.

Golden scissors cut the ribbon, confetti cannons went off, and guests walked into a space gathered around everyday beauty, the gallery's first visitors. Lin Wenke, founder of BDSD and UENO Living Gallery, shared his thoughts on seven years: not long, but long enough for some ideas to take root.

The gallery brings together original furniture, lighting, textiles, tableware and artworks. A team from the Japanese wooden-furniture maker Karimoku also travelled from Japan to share the story of the company's eighty-plus years.

At the afternoon salon, Zhou Anbin traced his practice under the title "Into the Wood: An Eighteen-Year Design Path".

It began with his first furniture class at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in 2008, when the teacher sent the students out to buy traditional bamboo pieces and take them apart. "That was the first time I understood craft with my hands. The resilience of bamboo, the way the joints lock: it all came out in the taking apart." Years later he made the Zhizhu Chair, redrawing the lines of a bamboo chair in metal, wood and leather. What one class planted kept growing for years.

There was no grand narrative in the talk, only the track of one person digging into wood, inch by inch, for eighteen years.

Curator Lin Wenke joined Zhou Anbin on stage, starting from projects the two have worked on together: how ideas sprout and works get built, the trade-offs in working out a design, lessons from co-developing products, and the relationship between material, structure and how it feels to live with them.

In the gallery, Zhou Anbin stood among the works and talked guests through the idea and feeling behind each piece.

From the first chair he made as a first-year student to the Xiaoyuan series, a reply to childhood memory; and the Boji (Dustpan) Chair. The Boji Chair is not a catalogue piece: Zhou Anbin made it for Rong Design Library's "Rong · Weaving" exhibition, which opened its brief in 2021 and, after two years of work, was shown at Design Shanghai in June 2023, curated by Zhang Lei, Jovana Zhang and Christoph John. Taking its cue from the bamboo dustpan of rural China, the chair carries a woven structure across the chair's three-dimensional curves: laser-cut stainless steel sheet with wood veneer, cowhide and ash, made so it can be produced in series. Every piece answers the same question: how design grows out of personal experience and finds its way back into everyday life.

Dak Haan pieces are on show too, such as the rounded sofa named for "having rice", the Youmi Sofa, designed by Zhang Shiqi.

At one end of the gallery, green and blue Half-Hundred% seats and a black Xiaoyuan Lounge Chair form a circle in front of a green woven screen. Xiaoyuan is named after Xiaoyuan New Village, where Zhou Anbin once lived; the Half-Hundred% Three-Seater Lounge Chair takes out the frame normally hidden inside a sofa and weaves the seat and back from straps.

Old friends and new came from all over to gather at UENO. The exhibition ran until 12 November.

[Slot for Dak Haan's own material: 3–6 single-piece photos from the Baidu folder 入木资料20260611 / 展览产品照片, suggested for section 04]