Didi Ng Wing Yin: The Nature of Wood

For Didi Ng Wing Yin, wood is an endlessly fascinating material with innate qualities that can be revealed through its transformation. In his late 20s, while working as an interior designer in Hong Kong, he felt he wanted to do more with his career, and was specifically interested in learning how to make furniture. An article in a magazine about a student exhibition of furniture made out of ultramarine blue plywood for an edition of the Stockholm Furniture Fair, piqued his interest enough to apply to the Aalto University, where the students were from, and see what happens. More than five-years later, Yin has established himself in Helsinki as an innovative furniture designer and artist – he also decided to study sculpture as a way of freeing his practice from the strictly utilitarian and into a more expressive, experimental way of making – whose relationship with wood runs as much towards the philosophical as to the technical.

For his first solo exhibition with Spazio Nobile, Didi NG Wing Yin presents new sculptural furniture and wall installations from his Pleats, Wood Ocean, Monolith and Wood Feathers series, work that reflects the duality within Ng’s practice. “My work can move between logical and not very logical at the same time. I am trying to stretch the two things – between design and art – and trying to find this balance,” he explains. “[I know] there is no answer but I am trying to stretch the bar to the optimal spectrum.”

While living in Finland, Ng has come to appreciate the “cottage lifestyle,” he says, and how people use wood for so many everyday things. His Vase series, for which he was a finalist in the 2025 LOEWE FOUNDATION Craft Prize, was initially inspired by spending a weekend in the countryside at a friend’s cottage and watching them chopping wood to prepare a barbecue one weekend. While firewood generally goes unnoticed for its particular beauty, he was intrigued with how in one motion with an axe, you could receive thousands of results – as each time the wood is split from one into two or three… the textures, grains, shapes are all different.

This perfect imperfection continues in his Pleats series, which is informed by the language of textile pleating. “Drawing inspiration from the language of textile pleating, Ng meticulously carves and folds solid timber to create rhythmic surfaces that evoke the softness of fabric and the passage of time. Each piece is both object and gesture, bridging East Asian traditions of craftsmanship and restraint with Nordic sensibilities of form and tactility,” writes Lise Coirier in the exhibition’s catalogue.

In addition to the carving, sculpting and shaping wood, Ng often incorporates colour onto his works. Rather than using a wood stain, he applies layers of ink through careful, repetitive brushstrokes or through dyeing. From a deep black China ink to rich Indigo blue or saffron red, Ng prepares the wood in such a way that the ink steeps into the wood and transforms it. “I am always concerned with the materials I am using,” he says. “So I began looking more deeply at the ink and about why I was using it and I thought about how ink is made from carbon and carbon is made from charcoal and charcoal comes from wood, so there is a natural connection.”

In Ng’s Wood Ocean series, “the works form a meditation on gesture and transformation, revealing how wood, like water, holds memory, movement, and depth. Each sculpture or functional piece is carved by hand, its surface rippling with fine undulations that evoke the motion of waves and tides,” writes Coirier. The Monolith series, a newer body of work for the artist, embodies his investigations into larger sculptural works; voluminous, hand sculpted forms take on animated characteristics, merging the ancient and contemporary.

The Nature of Wood presents an artist in full creativity. It offers the opportunity to see the breadth of Ng’s work and go deeper into his relationship to material, nature and form.

Didi Ng Wing Yin’s, The Nature of Wood is on view at Spazio Nobile Gallery through January 18, 2026.