03.24.25

Excerpt: Exhibition

Sung Jang Paints Imperfect Maps of His Memories at Volume Gallery in Chicago

In Shape of Land, the Chicago-based designer Sung Jang evokes locations that have personal meaning for him and abstracts them into dream places. Finding a deep resonance in cartography, Jang knows maps aren’t simply navigational tools, but more metaphorically, help us situate ourselves and understand our histories. At the city’s Volume Gallery, Jang’s show of objects and paintings — a six-panel screen and wall works of acrylic on linen, textured with inked sand — draws on his Korean heritage, with imagery that resembles continents and an imaginary topography of mountains and rivers. Jang was particularly inspired by maps from Korea’s Middle Joseon period — depictions of the world more valuable for their artistic and interpretive quality than their precision and utility.

More

03.22.25

Saturday Selects

Week of March 17, 2025

A weekly recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: the sky blue laptop of our dreams, our top picks from this month's Collectible fair in Brussels, and two exhibitions of paintings that explore and elevate domestic spaces.

More

03.15.25

Saturday Selects

Week of March 10, 2025

A weekly recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: an NYC design showroom decorated in the next “it” color, a set of desk accessories to improve any workspace, and a chic ceramic bowl for design-conscious cat owners (like myself!).

More

03.12.25

Excerpt: Exhibition

This New Exhibition Invites Artists and Designers to Reconsider a Classic Wedding Object

I got married a few months ago, and while it was by no means a traditional affair, there were of course moments and objects we incorporated into the ceremony that held historical meaning and significance. Something we didn’t include? (Admittedly because we’d never heard of it before?) The Loving Cup, a decorative vessel historically used at wedding banquets to commemorate a union, with two handles — one for each partner — and an inscription with the date and names of the couple. This endearing symbol of love and good fortune is the subject of an exhibition at New York’s Jacqueline Sullivan Gallery, where contemporary interpretations of these vessels by an interesting selection of artists and design talents are displayed alongside a host of historic artifacts.

More

03.06.25

Sight Unseen Presents

It’s Your Last Chance to Get a Copy of Sight Unseen’s 2024 Yearbook!

Each year, we attend dozens of design fairs and exhibitions, field thousands of pitch emails, and spend hundreds of hours on Instagram getting to know what our favorite brands and makers are making — tracking what new trends are developing, what new materials are being experimented with, and what classic forms and techniques are being reinvented or re-contextualized. And at the end of each year, we spend two months digesting everything we've seen for our annual Sight Unseen Yearbook, in which we choose 500+ of the objects that we found most memorable.

More

09.06.23

Sight Unseen Collection

Objects & Ideas Are Making Sculptural, Relational Objects in the Canadian Wilderness

Since we last checked in with Di Tao and Bob Dodd of Toronto’s Objects & Ideas, their furniture designs have moved increasingly towards functional sculpture. “We’ve always thought that every piece we make needs to have a strong character and a strong expression — that has never changed. But the way we express our ideas has evolved,” says Tao. The latest pieces are visually alluring objects that have a use, of course: The enveloping Beaver Tail chair offers a seat, the curving Ascend floor lamp provides illumination. But these works also — and just as importantly — are relational, changing the space that they, and you, occupy.

More

03.05.25

Fair Report

The 9 Best Things We Saw at Frieze Week Los Angeles 2025

We would be remiss not to address the relatively somber mood the LA wildfires cast over this year's Frieze week, an event that typically traffics in the commerce (and celebration) of extreme wealth while, for the rest of us, turbo-charging the sleepy LA social calendar to a welcome, if exhausting, degree. There were still sales to be made and parties to attend, to be sure, but everything felt a little quieter, a little more contemplative — and important to everyone to somehow acknowledge the context in which the fair was happening, whether in content or conversation.

More

03.04.25

Fair Report

A Wonderfully Cohesive Debut From Tobias Berg, Sight Unseen’s Best in Show Winner at Greenhouse, the Stockholm Showcase for Emerging Design

At the Stockholm Furniture Fair earlier this winter, we found the thing we're always searching for at these things: a designer whose work is so sophisticated and ready for the market that they're bound to be in the conversation for years to come. (A booth full of bangers, if you will.) And so our Best in Show at Greenhouse award this year went to Tobias Berg, a Norwegian designer with one of the most assured debuts we've seen in years.

More

03.03.25

Excerpt: Exhibition

In a London Gallery, Grace Prince Explores the Appeal of Fragments and Fragility

How do you hold absence? How do you embody something that's missing, or give shape and weight to a fleeting phantom? The six limited-edition pieces in Grace Prince’s new furniture collection — called Held Absence and made exclusively for London's Béton Brut gallery, where it's currently on view — all explore this paradox. The themes of absence and fragility that color this collection invoke their seeming opposites, presence and strength, while also raising the question: Are they so opposite after all?

More

03.01.25

Saturday Selects

Week of February 24, 2025

A weekly recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: an art fair lounge formed from flesh-toned inflatables, a dentist’s office that miraculously doesn’t make our skin crawl, and the ongoing rehabilitation of the great American diner.

More

02.28.25

Up and Coming

Each Project By This International Interiors Studio is More Than “Nice” — It’s a Self-Contained Jewel

Whoever said “nice guys finish last” clearly never met designers Sacha Leong and Simone McEwan. Since they started their London-based studio, Nice Projects, five years ago, the duo has completed a string of hospitality interiors that each has a distinctly expressive identity rooted in context, a strong focus on natural materials and local craft, and a touch of magic that has helped the dining spots soar in popularity. 

More

02.26.25

Sighted

Armando Cabral Turns the Cult-Famous USM Shelving Into a Collection Steeped In West African Symbolism

Getting creative with modular furniture can require a certain amount of inventiveness; there are only so many ways to organize a rigid set of components, as in the Swiss company USM’s signature Haller storage. So to produce something never before seen from such a precise framework — metal rods, ball-shaped connectors, and a system of wildly colorful milled steel panels — a designer really needs to think outside the, well, box. “Restraint sometimes allows you to think further in order to arrive at something unexpected,” says Armando Cabral, who has entwined the expressive elements of his West African heritage with strict Swiss production parameters in a new collaborative collection with USM.

More

02.23.25

Saturday Selects

Week of February 17, 2025

A weekly recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: an exhibition of sherbet-colored interior fantasy paintings; some sexy furniture on show in Luxembourg; highly desirable knitted cactus lights; and a preview of some wild rugs coming to Milan in April.

More