Naihan Li’s focus on the transitory nature of contemporary urban Chinese life made the Beijing-based designer the perfect fit as a collaborator on Broached East.

Hailing from Harbin in 1981, Naihan had moved to Beijing in the mid ‘80s and spent her childhood amidst the explosion of imported cultural concepts that defined the era. She left Beijing No.4 High School in 1999 to study in the UK. After a few years studying design and architecture in London’s Bartlett School of Architecture, Naihan returned to Beijing in 2004 and found the city in its most rapid and volatile state of simultaneous urban development and decay.

Living with The Crates – her famed portable interior furnishing collection – in an industrial studio space on the edge of Beijing, Naihan introduces furniture as a particular fashionable design response to a tangible social reality, thereby accommodating the modern and mobile lifestyle we live. Her work poses the question, ‘why not have furniture that reacts practically to how we are obliged to live?’ and, ‘why not have fun with it?’. She does.