Artists and designers the world over continue to choose to make the US their home. As the latest newcomers in this ‘nation of immigrants' join a crowd of inspiring locals with dual heritage, their varied experiences help shape creative America. To celebrate the country's role as a meeting point of creative minds, we look at the plurality of voices contributing to its enduring crucible of culture and dynamism. We speak to five studios – whose founders (all Wallpaper* US400 honorees) have roots in Poland, Vietnam, India, South Korea and China, but who have made the US their creative base – about how their heritage influences their output.
Meet a new generation of American designers
Soft Geometry
For many creatives, geography is less a fixed point than an inheritance, carried across borders and reimagined in new contexts. This is true for Utharaa Zacharias and Palaash Chaudhary, founders of Soft-Geometry, a practice that took root in India and found a fuller expression in the US, as the two became partners in work and life.
A rich cultural potpourri is the core of their practice. ‘Palaash is from Ghaziabad, near Delhi, and I am from Kochi, Kerala; it would be hard to pick two places more diametrically opposite,' says Zacharias. Growing up, they spoke different languages, ate different food and were raised in different religions, but their friendship found common ground in design. It began in college in Delhi and continued at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia, where working on projects revealed a shared aesthetic. One afternoon, they scribbled in a notebook that together they made ‘soft geometries'. Text by Aditi Sharma
Dominik Tarabański
Dominik Tarabański was born in 1982 in Radymno, Poland, a small town near the Ukrainian border, and studied photography in Łódź and Warsaw. After four years moving between Polish cities, he left for New York in 2012. Heading to New York, he says, was like going to the moon; a single three-week visit decided it for him. Fashion photography paid the bills and took him between New York, Paris and London. The still lifes he made by hand, away from the crowded sets.
Tarabański says he is pursuing ‘this intersection of synthetic and organic', which sits ‘at the foundation of everything I do'. He contorts living matter into arrangements as deliberately impossible as a Dutch flower painting, then photographs them at the fleeting point of giving way. The finished prints are large, over 2m tall, and hold the wall like sculpture. From a rubber band and a dried stem, he makes what he calls a kind of magic: ‘Nothing becomes something.' Text by Reeme Idris
Vy Voi
For Steffany Tran, the Vietnamese-American founder of New York-based studio Vy Voi, objects become storytellers. Their materials, form and construction reflect longstanding cultural traditions, which she interprets through her own voice. ‘I describe my practice as almost like using a metal detector and finding nuggets in history,' she says. Tran, whose parents are both refugees, grew up between San José, California, and Saigon, where she spent summers visiting her family.
After studying industrial design in the San Francisco Bay Area, Tran moved to New York, where she worked in traditional firms, where the fast pace and problem-solving briefs were not exactly aligned with her personal interest in the art of making. She then took up ceramics at a local community centre as a creative outlet and eventually, she decided to dedicate all her time to creating handmade objects inspired by Vietnamese craft, which she felt were missing from the contemporary design world. ‘It was almost an exercise in this idea of if you can't find it, build it yourself,' Tran says. Text by Diana Budds
Minjae Kim
Seoul-born, New York-based designer Minjae Kim discovered the US on an exchange in high school. After studying painting and architecture, and a stint of military service back home, in 2008 he travelled to Seattle to continue his studies, later moving to New York for a Master of Architecture at Columbia University. He spent three years at Studio Giancarlo Valle, then started his own practice from the basement of his old apartment during the pandemic.
His debut in 2021 at LA design gallery Marta catalogued Western typologies, such as a chair adapted from Freud's personal study. These were objects that differed from his understanding of the world, and he made them his by remaking them – for example, by treating fibreglass like cloth, quilting it before coating it with resin. Text by Reeme Idris
Kawabi
Lanterns are talismanic in Chinese folklore. They are beacons that guide ancestral spirits, invite prosperity, and protect against malevolent forces. For Aaron and Irisa Chan-Kawabi, founders of New York studio Kawabi, they are also symbols of belonging.
Whenever the designers encountered these objects in the US, typically at Chinese restaurants or souvenir shops, they were the same symmetrical red or white design. ‘How does a typology move from one culture to another?' Aaron wondered. He and Irisa saw parallels to their own experience as part of the diaspora (Irisa was born in China and grew up in Massachusetts; Aaron was born in Brooklyn to parents who emigrated from Hong Kong) and began to contemplate what a lantern that represented their own experience might look like. Text by Diana Budds