Shawn Tang

About halfway through my call with New York City-based Shawn Tang for this story, he gets excited by something at the window he is sitting next to. “No way, this happens once a year!” he exclaims, pointing his laptop’s camera to show a man suspended mid-air on a climbing rope, cleaning the windows of his 21st-floor apartment. My envy that this happens at all in his building aside, my greater sense of astonishment is the view behind the man: a perfect sightline onto lower Manhattan, its contours strongly defined against the clear skies of an early spring day. Expressing my amazement, Shawn silently moves the laptop to face another window, which looks out across the Hudson River to the most recognisable cityscape in the world: the Midtown Manhattan skyline.

Such flexing could border on showing off, except that Shawn is visibly as in awe of the view as I am, despite living here for three years. “It’s why we moved here,” he explains, referring to himself and his partner, Lili, a landscape architect and food artist. The couple were in Brooklyn before but came to Jersey City to enjoy a prospect over western Manhattan, which Shawn calls “the pretty side of the city”. When they moved in, the decision about what furniture to put in front of the windows informed everything else. “We asked ourselves, ‘What do we want to be doing in front of the view?’”, Shawn says. The answer was eating, “so everything else fell into place around where we put the dining table,” he says, explaining that his work table, a long Alvar Aalto piece, was set up to occupy the other half of the living space, with northward views from another three-pane bay window.

The notable lack of sofas in the space gives some clue to how Shawn and Lili spend their time. “We’re not the sort of couple to spend hours in front of Netflix,” he says. Instead, they both work a lot and, although Shawn is keen to say they do have downtime, they mostly do this out of the house, exploring the city. It’s when Shawn explains what he’s currently working on that I start to doubt he has any time off at all. He is currently creating furniture projects through Tang Thousand, his multidisciplinary art and design studio, which last year showed his modular sofa system at Basic.Space, Public Records and Collectible NYC. Also part of that project is ‘The Thousand Flower Shop’, a display of hand-blown glass flowers made in collaboration with Lucie Claudia Podrabska, an artist based in the Czech Republic, with whom Shawn is currently making new work. Then there is One of One, a new ‘living gallery’ championing emerging designers in the West Village, which he co-curates and mans every Sunday, when he is not helping Lili with Now Serving, a charitable food initiative the couple set up last year. Lastly, there is his new role as creative director of Wolfhouse, an iconic modernist home designed by Philip Johnson in upstate New York, soon to host a series of collaborations, exhibitions and activations, all overseen by Shawn.

It’s quite the output, but all of it is united by what Shawn describes as a desire to grab hold of the contemporary moment, one he says is defined by a lot of creative energy in New York. “Whether it’s an idea for furniture, an artist I want to showcase in the gallery, or a brand partnership I’m thinking about for Wolfhouse, I want to champion the voices of today in timely, contemporary ways,” he says.  So, rather than working with, say, a legacy furniture brand at Wolfhouse, Shawn is thinking instead about young designers doing “very radical things”, perhaps installing their work so that guests (the house will be rentable as a holiday home) can experience contemporary design in a domestic context. “I like the idea of two moments in design talking to each other, something that also happens at the gallery, which is in an old artist loft,” he says.

Listening to Shawn talk about his work, there’s an energy and a sense of possibility that come through even on our Google Meet call. He wasn’t always so enthusiastic, though. Up until three years ago, Shawn worked as an architect for large corporate practices, experiences which left him feeling creatively disillusioned and uninspired. “I just felt that the process from designing something to it being completed was way too long. The expectation of what the profession is when you’re in school and the day-to-day work is huge,” he says. Leaving the architecture world in 2023 to work for himself seems to have opened the floodgates for all that pent-up creative energy to be put to good use, to the point that the only thing stopping him is the fact that there are only so many hours in the day. 

Turning back to his home, Shawn says that the questions people ask when they first come over are, “‘How many chairs do you have?’ and ‘How much do you spend on electricity?’” – the latter one prompted by some 50 lamps he has around the living room. If in his professional life Shawn is more singularly focused on contemporary design by emerging talent, at home his sensibility would be better compared to that of a curator of an archival design museum (a role, which, at the rate he’s going, surely isn’t far off). Lighting in the space spans lamps by Joe Colombo, Louis Poulsen, Karim Rashid and Emilio Fabio Simion, all of which are overseen by Shawn’s favourite piece, the ‘YaYaHo’ lighting system by Ingo Maurer, suspended from the ceiling. “I got it vintage, but it was missing a specific transformer. When I contacted the company, they quoted me $1,200 for it. One Christmas Day, on the train home, I randomly searched for it on eBay and one had been posted five hours before for $150. It’s the luckiest I’ve ever got,” he says. 

As for his seating collection, Shawn started with 1970s space-age design, with pieces by Joe Colombo and Vico Magistretti, and has since worked his way through the later decades of the 20th century. There is a Pantone ’S’ chair in green, a yellow ‘Spaghetti’ chair by Giandomenico Belotti and – Shawn’s favourites – two Gaetano Pesce ‘Broadway’ chairs in mixed-tone moulded resin. “There’s really nothing like them,” he says. The collection runs all the way to the postmodernism of Frank Gehry’s ‘Cross Check’ chair and, with the most recent acquisition – a ‘Tom’ chair by Shawn’s good friend Reggy St-Surin – to the present day. Does this signal where his collection is headed? “Ultimately, I want to do things that can only exist right now,” Shawn says. “To work with people, ideas and moments that feel specific to today.” That feels like a yes.