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In suí-koo-niû, Lulu Lin imagines Taiwan as a beautiful girl. She is home to diverse peoples and a multitude of voices, and bound to them in a continuous negotiation strained by tension and pressure. Produced with Hong-Yan Pottery Studio, the work mixes ceramic with sediment gathered after floods in Guangfu, Taiwan, turning a physical remnant of environmental upheaval into the stuff of design. Since clay refuses complete control, Lin must listen to its transformations and answer them, arriving by degrees at a balance between matter and intent. The work suggests that even at a breaking point, another path and new growth can emerge.
The piece is one of five main projects in Island Under Pressure, the Taiwan Pavilion at Dutch Design Week 2026, on view from October 17 to 25 at Kazerne Design Lab in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. Climate is the terrain of Lin, a painter and ceramicist with a background in industrial and communication design. It is one of five pressures bearing down on contemporary Taiwan, alongside geopolitical, agricultural, industrial, and manufacturing. Each is distinct, yet overlaps with the rest in shaping how the island lives and makes, and the exhibition regards that pressure as a crucible from which transformation can emerge.
Taiwan’s Ministry of Economic Affairs and the Taiwan Design Research Institute (TDRI), the country’s national platform for design research, innovation, and international exchange, serve as the pavilion’s executive organizer. Its curator, Yen-An Chen, is founder and creative director of the Taipei studio Atelier YenAn and a board member of the Taiwan Industrial Designers Association. He trained in industrial and social design in Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands, and his work across product design, branding, film, and curation explores the overlooked worth of everyday objects, local knowledge, and industrial processes. For the pavilion, he has gathered designers, researchers, and manufacturers to explore how Taiwan’s materials adapt, transform, and endure under pressure.
Field, factory, flood, and frontier
Each of the five main projects was realized with a production partner and sponsor. Across fashion, furniture, ceramics, and writing objects, the works find multiple avenues to harness pressure as a creative force.
From Circular Materials to Everyday Wear by DYCTEAM
Agricultural pressure falls to DYCTEAM, a Taiwanese fashion brand devoted to sustainability and material research since 2017. Its From Circular Materials to Everyday Wear sets the pineapple at the heart of the research. An original jacquard developed with 496 Fabric Lab from pineapple leaf fiber yarn, regenerative cotton, and recycled PET fiber appears alongside garments in Seawool®, a yarn regenerated from recycled oyster shells, and pieces from the brand’s re series, made from textile offcuts. With TUCHEN TEXTILE also on board, the project follows its materials from fiber to finished garment. For DYCTEAM, circularity earns its meaning once a new material leaves the experimental stage and enters production, purchase, and wear.
Re : Churros by KIMU
KIMU draws its answer to industrial pressure. Founded in 2013 around the concept of “The New Old,” the design brand worked with SUPER DRAGON TECHNOLOGY on Re : Churros, turning recycled circuit boards into a wood-plastic composite, paired here with metal. The residue of Taiwan’s technology industry thus enters everyday life stamped with the identity of the production system it came from.
Once Soft by Ting-Hsuan Chang
Ting-Hsuan Chang, an industrial designer whose research centers on materials in states of flux, takes on manufacturing pressure. Her Once Soft, realized with Techome Technology, casts C-Stone, a recycled material made from stone-processing waste, in a process far removed from the cutting and carving stone ordinarily demands. Poured into fabric molds, the material takes shape under its own weight, pressing against the textile’s give. The cloth’s seams, folds, and tensions remain legible once it hardens, capturing a passing moment in which stone turns pliant.
The Invisible War by YSTUDIO
For YSTUDIO, makers of writing objects under the philosophy of “The Weight of Words,” the pressure is geopolitical. Developed with TONG.LE, The Invisible War starts from Taiwan’s geopolitical position and its digital information environment, asking how news, social media, and AI-generated content shape what we feel, whom we trust, and how we judge. The studio’s designers, Rosa Cuei and Swei Huang, each developed one of two works in recycled brass. The Mark turns an artillery shell casing into a stand for a bullet-inspired pen, a meditation on the lasting impressions words and information leave behind. The Trajectory balances a brass pen as if still in flight, conjuring information as it circulates and gets retold from one recipient to the next.
EcoCal® Laundry Detergent by picupi
Made in Taiwan, remade
Across the show, adaptation, material intelligence, and manufacturing know-how reflect a design culture bound to Taiwan’s geography and industry. For much of its life, the label “Made in Taiwan” has spoken of production, of efficiency and dependability, and has seldom been credited with imagination. To our eye, Island Under Pressure makes a persuasive case for its evolution. As the island’s internationally recognized prowess in technology and manufacturing increasingly meets material research, craftsmanship, and design, the phrase begins to vouch for design quality alongside the reliability it has long stood for. From where we stand in Manila, the roster of pressures is a familiar one. The Philippines knows floodwaters and typhoons, strained farmland, and a contested sea of its own, even as it has yet to answer them with a design culture of matching ambition, a potential still waiting to be claimed.
From experiment to production
The conversation spills past the exhibition itself at the EHV Innovation Café, held at Kazerne Design Lab on October 19 from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. Moderator Simone de Waart is joined by Oliver Lin, vice president of TDRI; curator Yen-An Chen; and Jennifer Shen of Yi Chun Green Technology. Their talk explores how material and design experiments might graduate from research into real-world production and use. It also asks how designers and industry, working together, can answer ever-shifting conditions. •
Island Under Pressure is open daily from 11 a.m. to 11:30 p.m. at Kazerne Design Lab, Paradijslaan 8, Eindhoven, until October 25.
