YUXUAN HUANG
Yuxuan Huang (b.1999) is a furniture designer based between Brooklyn, New York, and China. Working with natural materials that bear the marks of time and growth, her practice often employs a collage-like play of reclaimed wood, bamboo, stone, and other found or deconstructed matter. Fascinated by the cut motifs of traditional paper craft, she creates sketch-like furniture and lighting that echo craft legacies while carrying forgotten memories of the past.
Her recent collection, My Grandpa Once Taught Me How to Fly a Kite, explores hand-painted paper and shellac as sustainable mediums for illuminating, storytelling and memory keeping.
Born and raised in Chengdu, a mountainous city in southwest China, Huang has long sought subtlety and serendipity in the life of objects. Her passion for conceptual art led her to pursue an interdisciplinary education at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she studied Designed Objects and Photography. Her interest in space and time deepened into an exploration of form, materiality, and the functionality of furniture and objects. She received her MFA in Furniture Design from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2024.
Huang's work has been exhibited at SaloneSatellite in Milan, ICFF/WantedDesign Manhattan, Collectible New York, and Alcova Miami, and has been featured and mention in The New York Times, Wallpaper, Galarie, Sight Unseen, AN Interior, and Dezeen.
The idea for Yuhuan Huang’s Dream Catcher lighting collection was inspired by images of butterflies and illustrations from old encyclopedias found in secondhand bookshops.
Each butterfly is unique. Its wings display countless variations of brown and black, unexpected flashes of blue, green, yellow and red, while their patterns appear both ordered and impossible to replicate. Some of the most vivid colours are created not by pigment alone, but through the interaction of light with the microscopic structure of the wing. Colour shifts with the light, movement and the viewer’s position. In the variations of the wings’ shapes, colours and patterns, Huang sees the vitality and life force that give every living creature its individual form. For her, this uniqueness is evidence of life itself. It is this infinite capacity of nature to create difference that she sees as one of its most beautiful qualities.
These observations became the starting point for the Dream Catcher collection, created by Yuhuan Huang exclusively for BOOROOM GALLERY in July 2026. It comprises seven one-of-a-kind sconces, one table lamp and one floor lamp. Each piece began with an individual hand-drawn sketch. The “wings” of the lights are intentionally asymmetrical, and the patterns applied to them are never repeated, as in nature. An existing form is given a new interpretation through colour, while the floor lamp is a new version created specifically for the collection.
The shades are made from fibrous mulberry paper stretched over bamboo frames, hand-painted with pigment and ink and finished with shellac. When illuminated, the paper seems to dissolve into a translucent haze. The wooden elements are made from reclaimed wood and walnut. Each element is carved by hand without a predetermined pattern, allowing the marks of the carving tools to shape the silhouette freely and making every piece unique. Like a drawing, the carving remains an open, unrepeatable gesture — the movement of the hand preserved in form.
