This exhibition celebrates the vitality of function, with close attention to how it gives rise to actions, relationships, and cultural meaning.
Through the agency of materials, the fine oxide layers on titanium and silver surfaces refract hazy illusions, evoking a perception of memories that are absent and invisible. A handful of soil, a fragment of plaster, or a cluster of found objects become translations of collective emotion. When a cube flows across the body, when a rubber band is shaped by the viewer’s hand, when a steel pin trembles against the chest, function shifts from questions of use to the orchestration of behavior—opening space for the surrender of authorship and for provocations against established norms.
“Secondary Function” brings together works spanning fashion design, furniture, and contemporary jewellery, developed in collaboration with artists from the Glasgow School of Art. It reveals how function—once unbound from the confines of utility—re-enters the broader narrative of contemporary craft in exciting and unexpected ways，offering new inspiration for the ontological dialectic between technique and concept.
Through the agency of materials, the fine oxide layers on titanium and silver surfaces refract hazy illusions, evoking a perception of memories that are absent and invisible. A handful of soil, a fragment of plaster, or a cluster of found objects become translations of collective emotion. When a cube flows across the body, when a rubber band is shaped by the viewer’s hand, when a steel pin trembles against the chest, function shifts from questions of use to the orchestration of behavior—opening space for the surrender of authorship and for provocations against established norms.
“Secondary Function” brings together works spanning fashion design, furniture, and contemporary jewellery, developed in collaboration with artists from the Glasgow School of Art. It reveals how function—once unbound from the confines of utility—re-enters the broader narrative of contemporary craft in exciting and unexpected ways，offering new inspiration for the ontological dialectic between technique and concept.
—Yating Xie, Founder of TaJo Studio, MA Jewellery and Metal at the Royal College of Art
Go System no.1 (2025), 900x900x440
Photo by Dong-eun Choi
