Fusing life and emotion is what the Taiwanese design team of Owen Chuang and Cloud Lu profess to be about. Their website, an expressive journey of text and images contests to this.
Next to their most recent creation, the “Peaceful Bomb” it reads:
“War is destructive and cruel; it will mercilessly take away life and happiness. We don’t hear the deafening explosion when this ‘Peaceful Bomb’ falls on the ground, nor the devastation after the explosion. We see flowers and plants which are full of life. They sway in the wind of freedom and emit unlimited vitality.”
The bomb is actually a missile-shaped vase that will look as if it augered into your coffee table — your favorite posies sprouting from its tail end. It’s reminiscent of peace marchers during the Vietnam war who placed flowers into soldiers’ rifles in protest. Social issues have been a key ingredient for Owen and Cloud for some time and partial proceeds of the “Bomb” go to the anti-war group Act now to Stop War and End Racism.
The duo formed their design company biaugust in 2000 while still students with what they say was and still is, the “passion to design like the blazing sun in August.”
Like so much on their website, allegory weaves its way around its designer curves. The heat of August is not only a creative force to the duo but also the month in which they were both born, hence the company’s surprisingly simplistic name, biaugust. Their products have been available in North America since April and in September they will be participating in the Paris Trade Show, Maison & Object. Their vision has led them to win several international design prizes from Japan, Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Exploring the connection between people and design through product design as well as non-commercial work is their driving force. “The Nonlife Zoo” is an example of one of their non-commercial projects created to advocate environmental protection and animal welfare with the direct purpose of educating the next generation. Animal “dolls” with skeleton faces tell the story of their possible extinction through mankind’s ignorance and neglect.
They describe it as: “A new kind of zoo that will emerge in the near future — a zoo without any living creatures. In the zoo park, you can only find still, immovable animals but no living creatures; you can only hear painful groans from helpless animals, but no children’s joyful laughter.”
In another installment of “The Nonlife Zoo,” called “The Extinct Animal’s Graveyard” there are 736 tombs representing the number of animal species that are known to have become extinct over the past 400 years. The “Zoo” is a five-part series that also encapsulates the irony of people pursuing fashion at the expense of animals. The latest instalment is to be exhibited at “My Humble House Art Gallery” in Taipei during the middle of July. Through these exhibits, the pair makes donations to the World Wildlife Fund.
From the slightly whimsical to the rather morbid, the designs of Owen and Cloud unquestionably effuse emotion and call upon us to do the rest.