Chinese Designer Chen Min Refuses to Choose Between Old and New — He Combines Them

Chen Min’s Neo-o-old platform is reshaping Chinese craft and design, continuing the designer’s years of work in connecting craftspeople with the contemporary design ecosystem

Chinese designer Chen Min often talks about the future, but rarely in the way you might expect. He isn’t particularly interested in technologies, trends or the race to create something entirely new. Instead, his attention is fixed on older things: a bamboo stool, a strand of silk, the worn surface of a brick salvaged from a demolished building. These objects, he believes, already contain the knowledge needed to imagine what comes next.

That philosophy sits at the heart of Neo-o-old, the platform Chen founded to explore the increasingly fertile space between heritage and contemporary design. The name itself sounds like a contradiction, but for Chen, contradiction is often where the most productive ideas emerge. Throughout his work, old and new are not opposing forces but complementary ones, existing in constant dialogue. ‘In China, we’ve lost so much of our culture and tradition in the past decades,’ he says. ‘That’s why I came up with Neo-o-old: to help counter that and to bring them into the future.’

We’re talking at his studio in Hangzhou’s atmospheric Xiangshan Art Commune, a new development of low-rise structures that sits in the shadow of the nearby mountains, built with reference to the region’s traditional Jiangnan-style whitewashed walls and grey roof tiles, and a rather apt encapsulation of Chen’s old-meets-new ethos.

Chen’s concern is understandable. Over the last half-century, China’s development has been defined by extraordinary speed. Entire neighbourhoods have disappeared. New cities have risen. Traditional industries have been transformed. In the process, though, countless forms of ancient craft knowledge have become vulnerable.

Chen’s response in forming Neo-o-old aims to connect contemporary global designers with traditional makers and allow centuries-old skills to find relevance in modern contexts. For him, meaningful innovation begins with understanding origins. ‘We need to get to the original image of how this craft came into place,’ he explains. ‘The people’s behaviour, the society, the economic situation. You need to really get back to that time and understand how it came to be. Then you come back to now and see how you can update it.’

This approach has taken Chen across China. Through Neo-o-old and a series of independent research projects, he has spent years working with bamboo artisans, silk producers, embroiderers, gold-leaf makers and silver filigree specialists. Along the way, he has become less interested in finished objects than in the intelligence embedded within their making. Silk, in particular, occupies a central position in his thinking.

Through collaborations with fellow Hangzhou firm Cathaya, one of the world’s leading silk producers, Chen has explored silk not merely as a luxurious material but as an entire cultural ecosystem. His research examines the relationship between mulberry cultivation, silkworms, labour, trade and design. The material becomes a lens through which to understand broader questions of history and identity.  ‘I wonder how our ancestors first thought of guiding a tiny insect to spin a thread so fine and fragile,’ he reflects.

Chen’s award-winning Hangzhou stool embodies many of these ideas. On the surface, it appears remarkably simple, a contemporary reinterpretation of an everyday Chinese object. Yet Chen describes it as both furniture and system, an object informed by Chinese philosophy and a belief in flexibility.

‘It’s a piece of furniture. It’s also an object. It can be a system,’ he says, observing: ‘It’s like Bruce Lee describing water.’ Sitting on the stool, the complication becomes apparent: what seemed sturdy flexes, as the curves take your weight and find a natural equilibrium.

This fluidity extends beyond individual projects and into Chen’s broader view of creative practice. Another ambition behind Neo-o-old is to challenge the traditional separation between art, craft and design. In his view, contemporary creativity increasingly exists in the overlap between these categories. ‘In creative practice now, the boundaries have started to become blurry,’ he says. ‘Why should we restrict ourselves to these artificial borders?’

That belief was strengthened by his experience as a finalist in the 2018 Loewe Foundation Craft Prize, a platform he cites as a pivotal influence on his development. At the time, he found himself surrounded not by industrial designers but by artists and craftspeople. ‘I was the only designer inside that group,’ he recalls. ‘That changed my thinking a lot.’

For Chen, the significance of his experience extends well beyond the prestige of the prize itself. The organisation’s long-running commitment to craft has helped demonstrate that traditional making techniques can sit at the centre of contemporary design discourse rather than at its margins. It offers a global example of how craft can function as a driver of innovation rather than merely a vehicle for nostalgia. 

Neo-o-old occupies a similarly important role within China. If Loewe provides an international framework that validates craft as a contemporary cultural force, Neo-o-old creates the local conditions for those conversations to occur. One establishes global benchmarks, the other builds connections on the ground. Together, they point towards an alternative future for Chinese design.

It’s a refreshing turn. For decades, discussions about China’s creative industries have often centred on manufacturing efficiency, scale and technological advancement. Chen acknowledges these achievements but argues that China’s greatest resource remains ephemeral: ‘For me, the most valuable thing in China is still culture.’

As artificial intelligence proliferates and digital technologies become increasingly embedded in everyday life, that conviction only strengthens. ‘The more AI technology advances, the more people will miss the material." 

For Chen, the future of design will not be built solely through algorithms or production systems. It will emerge through renewed engagement with materials, stories and forms of knowledge that remain deeply human. In that future, the challenge is not choosing between old and new — it’s learning how to bring them together.

neooold.com