Design World Mourns The Too-Brief Life of Tobias Wong

by Deidre Woollard (RSS feed)
Jun 3rd 2010 at 6:01PM

The design world lost one of its brightest young stars recently. Tobias Wong was just 35 and had been turning out pieces that combined art, design and a dose of irreverant wit for years. As the NY Times reported in a comprehensive obituary, Wong first got attention after turning a Philippe Starck Bubble Club chair into a lamp. A lot of his best pieces were riffs on other designers' work or taking an existing concept and tweaking it in his own unique way. He created an engagement ring with the diamond turned so it was more of a weapon than a piece for admiration, a usually fragile crystal chandelier took on a new resilience after being dipped in rubber and the concept of remote-controlled lighting got an elegant lift with his vitrine-encased light switch. He took particular aim at our concepts of luxury with pieces like a gold-plated McDonalds coffee stirrer, a stack of $1 bills bound together like a notepad and capsules filled with edible gold leaf. Wong's death has been ruled a suicide. Many design blogs including Core 77 have written tributes to his one-of-a-kind talent.

Tags: design, designer, tobias wong