We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Shan Tang. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Shan below.

Shan, appreciate you joining us today. Can you walk us through some of the key steps that allowed you move beyond an idea and actually launch?

For every creation, I spend a considerable amount of time gathering inspiration from various fields. Apart from the realm of spatial design, I also explore art, other design-related topics, as well as nature, humanities, and technology. I aim for my designs to be explorations from multiple dimensions. After collecting various inspirations, I connect the things that interest me to generate a rough idea. Then it’s a matter of continuously refining and scrutinizing this idea, as well as figuring out ways to bring it to life.

Shan, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I grew up in Shenzhen, a very young and vibrant city. However, in this city dominated by skyscrapers, I have always yearned for more contact with nature. During my university years, I took the initiative to propose a research project on agricultural landscapes, something that not many people were doing at the time, to the art space where I was working. At that time, our art space invited the highly renowned Japanese architect, Sosuke Fujimoto, to design a new space for us. We wanted to incorporate the simple and rustic agricultural philosophy into that art space. Back then, very few young people were interested in agriculture, but I was very excited and passionate about it. Although the process of research and practice was challenging, that experience opened up a new perception of nature and art for me. I also had the opportunity to connect with outstanding artists such as Olafur Eliasson, Xu Tan, and engage in discussions with them. I treated that practical experience as my own artistic creation, and every day, scenes of life flourishing beneath the land would come to mind.

I am particularly interested in edible plants, perhaps because I grew up in the city, where the food I saw was carefully selected and flawless in supermarkets. In this artificially constructed environment, I didn’t know how the food I ate every day grew from the ground, the original appearance of the land beneath our feet. In those years of agricultural landscape practice, I learned that the food growing in the soil could be as beautiful as flowers. They are like fireworks collided during the billions of years of natural evolution, connecting human life and Mother Earth. I really want to convey this perception to others, especially in today’s urban environment where the food crisis is gradually becoming a phenomenon.

In my past designs, I continuously attempted to integrate agricultural landscapes and sustainable biological systems into my spatial design concepts. This includes the project ‘Arboaretum,’ which transformed a wetland in Los Angeles into a botanical garden and . This project was exhibited at the 2022 Design Chongqing Biennale – RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects) Youth Power. Another project, ‘Play,’ where a vegetable garden is part of the playground concept for a kindergarten, was selected for the 2022 RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects) 100 Young Creator in Metaverse. This also includes my current project, the transformation of a chateau in the south of France into a site with an aerial farm and hydroponic system, et cetera.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

The process of starting a business is challenging, but at the same time, new opportunities and goals are constantly emerging. During my time running the studio, I have to address the needs of various clients and if there is a breakthrough in the work. Because my goal for my design studio is to make more challenging designs, I often struggle to think about how to make my projects more innovative and combine that mission with studio efficiency to make money. Usually, there is a contradiction between innovative design and flow design in terms of profit, and I have to constantly find ways to solve this contradiction.

For every creation, I spend a considerable amount of time gathering inspiration from various fields. Apart from the realm of spatial design, I also explore art, other design-related topics, as well as nature, humanities, and technology. I aim for my designs to be explorations from multiple dimensions. After collecting various inspirations, I connect the things that interest me to generate a rough idea. Then it’s a matter of continuously refining and scrutinizing this idea, as well as figuring out ways to bring it to life.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

I hope that my creations can slightly influence people’s attention to nature and inspire everyone’s love for nature. We often advocate for taking the path of sustainable ecology because various environmental degradation issues are becoming more frequent. However, I understand that it is difficult to get ordinary people to pay attention to these issues because there must be practical solutions that everyone can experience firsthand and implement easily in real life. I hope that my designs can, in some ways, bring people closer to nature, arouse their attention to nature, inspire them to cherish and protect it, and transform this protection into simpler and more feasible implementation plans.