Rice Straw Stool by Gina Hsu and Nagaaki Shaw

Rice Straw Designs by Gina Hsu, Nagaaki Shaw and Jenju Villagers

The Jenju Village Community in Taiwan, also known as ‘Jane’s Pearl’, is the ancestral site of the Pingpu Kamalan Tribe. The Dongshan river runs directly through the community, making it ideal for residents to preserve the area’s rice paddy-based industry, which accounts for up to 136 hectares of the area in and around the village. Following each rice harvest, a huge amount of rice straw is left behind. historically for farmers, this was an essential building and material supply. However, with our changing times, this excess supply is no longer needed for building and is not being utilized.

Taiwan is currently facing many agricultural changes, as certain types of materials and products are being removed from their areas. Jenju Village communities are promoting the symbiotic concept of peaceful coexistence with nature, encouraging us to return what we have expelled, so that nature can begin to produce and provide us with essentials once again. For the preservation of the village’s rural culture and ideas concerning the environment, Taiwanese designers Gina Hsu(Hsu Ching Ting 徐景亭) and Nagaaki Shaw(Hsiao Yung Ming 蕭永明) have developed ‘Rice Straw Design’ – a series of objects – in which the straw received from the fields is used by the community to promote the material itself, becoming a point of departure for use in arts and crafts. As part of the development and usage of this rice straw, a museum, as well as a DIY shop has been established so that visitors can experience the art and craft of working with the natural material.

Rice Straw Stool by Gina Hsu and Nagaaki Shaw

Rice or grain products have advantages and disadvantages concerning its usages as a design material. One of the advantages of rice straw, rice bran or rice itself is that it is rich in texture. however, the major disadvantage of these materials is that they do not possess enough long-term durability. Gina Hsu and Nagaaki Shaw have combined epoxy resin with the straw and rice to improve their resilience and durability so that the materials may serve a broader purpose and be transformed into items used in the home on a daily basis.

The projects will be on show at the Lanyang Museum, Taiwan until september 26th, 2010.

Via Designboom

4 thoughts on “Rice Straw Stool by Gina Hsu and Nagaaki Shaw”

  1. Hi Polley
    Great post and great to see you are finding some time to devote to chairs.

    I’m commenting here rather than by e-mail because what I have to say might also be interesting for other readers.

    Sorry, I had to change the lay out of your post so that the first you see is a photo, then some text and then another photo if any. Usually I only add categories to your posts without interfering in the post itself, because it is your post and not mine. But the Photo first rule I try to adhere as much as possible to.

    As you can read at the bottom of the page Chairblog | Tumblr I’ve now imported all old Tumblr posts and last week I have given all “Untitled” posts a title. In that process I have deleted approximately 260 posts from the 920 I imported earlier

    Next thing to do in maintenance is to make sure as much as possible that the categories of all posts are ticked off properly…A blog is a lot of maintenance.

    Thereafter I’ll be thinking about changing some categories into tags, but not sure yet as to how. Probably along the line of type of chair. For instance a chair-, a stool-, an armchair- , a bench and a sofa tag and so on. Not sure yet.

    Finally, for various reasons I have changed the automatic translation method into one that works per post and is much lighter than the prior one that was burdening the space the blog takes on the server too much and was cause for many errors.

    Have a nice day (night by now on your site of the globe)

  2. Thanks for the tip Guido. And, changing the layout is perfectly fine for me, it makes sense too. I’ll remember the photo-first rule further on.

    I need to give you a great shout-out. You’ve done a marvelous job on administrating the functionality and content of this website. Many effort is behind the scenes, but people do benefit from the clean and tidiness. Big CHEER for you! I think tags would work since it breaks the inheritance nature of category, and sometimes the categories are, well, just a group of related articles while the group itself doesn’t have to be in a form of structure. I think tags are the way to go. Tell me if, or how, I can help out.

    Thanks.

    P.S. I really do miss web surfing and blogging. Hope to manage more time on it. Blogging is a get-away for me now.

  3. Oh yes and tagging…once the categories are according to my ideas it will be easy to convert some categories into tags as I anticipated…but that will take some more time…First because the actual categorizing takes considerable time and secondly because the messy 404 errors need to balance out and that takes some time as well.

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