At a time when water is creating the seemingly inevitable annual destruction brought about by flash storms and freakish floods, it’s easy to understand the fear that designer Pao-Hui Kao has expressed when explaining the thought process behind her project, Paper & Water.
Defining the concept development of the project as a 'questioning of her beliefs', the metaphor has a sense of hope in questioning and challenging the things we take for granted, we can find fruitful answers.
By counter intuitively soaking paper in water, an act that would usually be seen as a futile and damaging, Kao discovered that by reforming the paper into tubes and then constructing honeycomb-like structures she could actually transform the soggy paper into a sturdy and aesthetically pleasing partition and seating system.
