'Taihu Zhuoying' won the third prize in the Jiangsu Division of the 13th Future Designer National College Digital Art Design Competition

Recently, the winners of the 13th Future Designers National College Digital Art Design Competition (NCDA) Jiangsu Division were announced.

A team composed of teachers from Nanjing University of the Arts, including Wang Li and Wang Yuxiang, won the third prize in the industrial product design category for their 'Taihu Shadow' tea set design.

The inspiration for 'Taihu Shadows' came from the creative team's encounter with Taihu stones in the Humble Administrator's Garden on a rainy day.

It is not a static ornamental stone. Rainwater seeps, accumulates, and drips along the holes. The stacked stone body and the transparent holes seem to be breathing. This 'empty form' deeply touched the designer.

After returning to the studio, the team immersed themselves in ancient books and paintings, and repeatedly pondered the standards of 'thin, wrinkled, leaky, and transparent' stone quality.

Finally, I realized the Eastern philosophy contained in it: 'leakage' is the path for the flow of charm, 'penetration' is the confrontation between the inner and outer world, 'thinness' is the character, and 'wrinkle' is the time.

Therefore, the team no longer regards Taihu stone as a simple design subject, but attempts to make the artifact a contemporary translation of this philosophy.

In the 'Taihu Shadow' tea set, the form of Taihu stone is refined into a three-dimensional structure on the lid.

It is not only a decoration, but also a landscape corridor where the fragrance of tea and heat travel; the deep color of the clay is like the thousands of years of stone deposition.

Through contemporary lines and materials, the designer successfully conducted a dialogue with 'stone' across time and space, allowing the ancient breath to continue in the daily tea banquets.

The team stated that the original intention of 'Taihu Shadows' is to make traditional culture 'touchable and usable'. In the future, it will continue to deeply explore local cultural resources and launch more design works with both cultural connotation and contemporary value, so as to integrate traditional beauty into modern life.