Exhale — Baicai Design

Exhibition: exhale

The warmth of winter sunlight, fleeting condensation on glass, familiar streets, and local dialect become traces of time and everyday life. When viewed anew, these seemingly ordinary moments reveal a poetry that lies somewhere between familiarity and absurdity.

Project Info:

Status: built, 2023
Area: 100 sqm
Location: Shenyang

The exhibition brings together works by Sun Yiwen, Zhang Wenzhi, Zheng Wei, and other artists, alongside contributions from local cultural collectives. Painting, sculpture, moving image, text, and sound intersect within a shared setting. Individual experiences converge to form a nonlinear narrative of the city. Rather than being viewed in isolation, the works enter into dialogue, generating new contexts through their relationships with one another.

The space is conceived as an unfinished scene of everyday life. Newspapers, red lettering, paper cuttings, and temporary display structures are introduced into the existing architecture through a collage-like approach. Familiar objects are removed from their ordinary contexts and take on new meanings through suspension, layering, and displacement. As visitors move through the exhibition, their views are interrupted, directed, and gradually revealed, turning observation into a spatial and bodily experience.

We seek to preserve this sense of incompleteness and uncertainty, allowing the space to hold contrasting emotions: warmth and distance, humor and silence, nostalgia and the present. Rather than reconstructing a definitive image of Shenyang, the exhibition brings together fragments of different lives, forming a collective memory of winter that can be felt without needing to be fully explained.

About

Baicai Design is a multidisciplinary design practice based in New York and Shenyang, working across architecture, interiors, exhibitions, and spatial design. Its practice spans different geographies, scales, and cultural contexts.

Founded by Kaiwen Zhao, Baicai is shaped by his interdisciplinary background in design and architecture. Zhao studied Industrial Design at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and Architecture at the Yale School of Architecture. He currently teaches in the Department of Industrial Design at RISD, and has previously taught at the University of Colorado Denver, lectured at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, and served as a guest critic at Syracuse University.

Baicai approaches space beyond the conventional boundaries of interior design, bringing together architectural and product design thinking to address spatial questions. Through different scales of intervention, we explore the relationships between space, objects, and human behavior.

New York:
540 Fulton St, Brooklyn, NY, 11201

Shenyang:
A07International Software Park, Shenyang, China

baicaidesignoffice@gmail.com

Awards

FRAME Wellness Space of the year Shortlisted
2026

Paris Design Awards Winner
2026

MUSE Design Awards Gold Winner
2026

Dezeen China Rising Firm of the Year
2025

POSITION Award China Best 100 Young Architect
2024

Guangzhou Design Week 40 Under 40
2024

AD China 100 YOUNG
2022-2024

Architizer Best Young Interior Design Firm Special Mention
2024

Forbes China 30 Under 30
2023

FRAME Small Residential of the year Shortlisted
2023

FRAME Award Best Emerging Designer Nominee
2023

APIDA Design Award Excellence Award
2023

FRAME Pop-up Store of the Year
2022

FRAME Window Display of the Year Shortlisted
2022

WYDF TOP 100 Designer
2022

Dezeen Award Shortlisted
2022

Architecture Masterprize Best of The Bests
2022

AD China 100 YOUNG
2020-2022

Architecture Masterprize Honorable Mention
2022

KUKAN Design Award Shortlisted
2022

DNA Award Winner in Workplace Design
2022

DNA Award Honorable Mention in Workplace Design
2022

DNA Award Honorable Mention in Showroom Design
2022

K-Design Award Winner
2022

Novum Design Award Gold Award
2022

Novum Design Award Silver Award
2022

IDA Design Award Honorable Mention
2022

FRAME Best of the Month
2022 April

Design for Asia Award Bronx Award
2021

Design for Asia Award Excellence Award
2021

IDEA Design Award Finalist
2021

Golden Pin Design Award Winner
2021

Golden Pin Design Award Honorable Mention
2022

Press

Baicai Design’s work has received international media coverage across architecture, design, fashion, and culture. The studio has been featured in publications including Gestalten, INTERIORS, AD China, FRAME, Interior Design China, My Home, and id+c, alongside leading global platforms such as Dezeen, Leibal, Architizer, Divisare, Vogue, ELLE China, Yatzer, Cosmopolitan, gooood, Archilovers, Designverse, and Archello.