Maison Shanghai 2025 successfully concluded on September 12 at the Shanghai World Expo Exhibition & Convention Center(SWEECC). Centered around the theme “Design ∞ Infinity,” the four-day event drew 47,077 professional visitors, with international attendance rising 123% year-on-year, spanning 136 countries and regions.
While the exhibition buzzed with activity, one space offered a moment of reflection — the H3 Design Highland Pavilion, the intellectual core of this year’s show. Rather than a product showcase, it was a curated landscape of ideas, where leading designers explored how design can connect material, emotion, and philosophy.
Lo Chi Wing | The Art of Stillness
Facing Lo Chi Wing’s works, visitors instinctively slowed their pace. His creations reject ornamentation in favour of calm restraint, embodying Eastern philosophies of silence and balance. Each object holds quiet vitality — a reminder that within every home, there should be a space for stillness.
BANMOO × Lv Yong Zhong | Living Objects 2006–2025
This retrospective traced nearly two decades of design practice by Lv Yong Zhong, spanning furniture, space, and brand creation. His vision celebrates the dialogue between matter and spirit, expressed through BANMOO’s signature warmth — a harmony of nature, craftsmanship, and time.
Zhong Song | TIANWU – Boundless Realm
With “Boundless Realm” as its concept, Zhong Song’s TIANWU Couture series reinterpreted luxury living through a pure architectural lens. Each piece blurred the boundaries between art and daily life, prompting reflection on how design ultimately serves our pursuit of freedom and inner richness.
Jamy Yang | Evolution of Design: Handcraft, Machine, and Algorithm
Yang Mingjie’s installation merged manual skill, digital fabrication, and algorithmic design, investigating how technological shifts reshape furniture and creativity. His works visualised the delicate balance between human intuition and artificial intelligence.
Gary Zeng | The Courtyard of Fusion
Through the metaphor of a garden, Gary Zeng built an immersive space uniting art, design, and nature. Visitors wandered through a tranquil courtyard of flowing greenery and poetic light — a physical embodiment of Zeng’s enduring philosophy of “slow living through design.”
Lai Ya-Nan | The VIP Lounge
In the VIP Lounge, designer Lai Ya-Nan created a “Colorful Garden” filled with hand-woven outdoor furniture in joyful hues. The tactile warmth and colourful rhythm of the space offered visitors a moment of ease — a gentle invitation to reconnect with comfort and pleasure.
XUE | Born of Bamboo
Bamboo, an ancient Eastern material, took on new life in XUE’s “Born of Bamboo” exhibition. Through contemporary craftsmanship and technology, the show revealed bamboo’s evolution from structural element to medium of innovation, bridging tradition and the future.
Jean & Du | Transparent Art, Minimal Living
Jean & Du explored the expressive potential of acrylic, using light, proportion, and precision to construct meditative environments. The translucency of their furniture blurred the line between object and space, evoking a poetic clarity in modern living.
Frank Chou | The Poetics of Stillness
At the Chang showcase, designer Frank Chou envisioned a silent, tactile environment where time seems to pause. Through natural tones and subtle compositions, his installation embodied the brand’s long-termist philosophy — finding calm in continuity.
Hou Zheng-Guang, Zhan Xiao-Ming & Tu Jun-Li | No Bamboo, No Home
Inspired by the saying “Better to live without meat than without bamboo,” this curatorial project connected craftsmen, designers, and bamboo enterprises. It reintroduced bamboo as a living design language for contemporary interiors, balancing poetry and practicality.
Moorgen | Invisible Technology, Visible Beauty
Also inside the Design Highland Pavilion, Moorgen unveiled its vision of “borderless intelligence.” Curated by Zhong Song, the space employed layered, translucent structures to express technology as emotion — where light, motion, and form merged into a sensorial experience of future living.
Text by Lee Khe Ying
Images courtesy of Maison Shanghai 2025
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