We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Ziyan Wang a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Ziyan, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.

As an artist and designer with a bachelor degree from Rhode Island School of Design, Department of Furniture Design, I was introduced to and explore deeply in various kinds of materials and crafts during my studies here. My close relationship with materials and crafts largely influenced how I approach designs.

Indigo as Language, for example, is a project that I started in my senior year in RISD and focuses heavily on the study of a specific craft that resulted in the creation of a series of domestic objects. I will talk about this project in detail in the later answers.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

My name is Ziyan(Mia) Wang (b. 2001, Guangzhou, China). I am a production/collection furniture designer currently based in Providence, RI, USA. Blending craft and narrative is at the heart of my creative process. As a Chinese designer, I’m passionate about sharing my cultural and historical identity within the global design sphere. I draw inspiration from a myriad of sources, including rituals, traditional arts and crafts techniques, as well as both personal and collective memories. Through my work, I strive to craft functional yet deeply artistic pieces that forge emotional connections between people and the spaces they inhabit.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

For me, the most rewarding aspect of being an artist or creative is the power to bring attention to the beauty of the ordinary and the opportunity to evoke unique emotions from my audience through work. My newest collection centers around surface design in domesticity. In domestic spaces, we are surrounded by objects with natural and designed surfaces. In my childhood, I spent long hours of my “time-outs” staring at the rain drops on the glass windows of my grandparents’ apartment, the spots of light and shadows on the white walls, the swirling wood grains of grandpa’s Huanghuali table. My thoughts got drowned into the details of the materialities of these mundane objects. Their textures and gradients are like words of poems, whispering a unique story of their own. This memory gave birth to my series, Indigo as Language, where I create a series of seating objects(a lounge chair, a dining chair and a bench) that uses indigo as a transformative medium of surface design. Through the process of dying, the materials that construct the objects are given a voice, and they become storytellers of our domesticity. In each dyed object, we see not just a visual spectrum, but a narrative spectrum – a tapestry of experiences and emotions, interwoven with the threads of our daily lives. These dyed objects invite us to appreciate the innate quality of materials and to embrace the beauty of the ordinary, creating a home where we are uniquely and emotionally connected with our surroundings.

Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?

One aspect of my journey as a creative that non-creatives might struggle to grasp is the fact that a creative’s journey is not linear; it’s a series of peaks and valleys, breakthroughs and setbacks. Non-creatives might perceive success as solely measured by external validation or tangible achievements, but for many of us, the real triumph lies in the process itself – in the moments of discovery, experimentation, and growth.

In 2022, my twin sister, Cara Wang(a professional illustrator), and I collaborated to create an illustrated bench that tells a story of fantasy inspired by our childhood tales from grandmother and received much attention on the internet. A thought arose in our heads: We can make a collaborative studio that fuses object making with illustration. Later that year, with the help of RISD Entrepreneurship we created our creative dual, House of Wando, a craft and home decor studio that is inspired to create warmth, delight and togetherness with functional objects of visually captivating surfaces. However, we soon realized that the attention from social media does not translate into actual business, and we find very few buyers of our works. One of the fundamental reasons we discovered is the lack of functionality of our objects. Illustrations and paintings on small wooden surfaces appear to people as too “delicate” and “not food-safe” for daily use. I realized captivating surfaces are not approachable solely with carefully designed illustrations. Dye as a media is capable of many ways to be adapted in surface design. In the Indigo as Language project, even though certain pieces of wood and fabric were dyed with the same process, they still turned out with their own unique, sporadic and abstract dye patterns. With the quality of being much more efficient for production and more capable of holding top coats, dyed surfaces quickly became the signature of my design works.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://issuu.com/ziyanwangmia/docs/mia_wang_furniture_design_portfolio_2023
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/miawang_zy?igsh=bmQzNHVqOWs1NGV0&utm_source=qr
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mia-wang-8587aa252/