Baas first produced Plastic Chair in Wood in 2008 whilst participating in Contrast Gallery’s residency program which brought Western artists to China to study local artistic and cultural practices. Baas became interested in woodworking and challenged woodcarvers from Shanghai to make works which were a hybrid between Western design practice and traditional Chinese craft techniques.

Maarten Baas’ pieces, although produced in a series, are all uniquely handmade. Baas’ Plastic Chair in Wood is the antithesis to the anonymous mass manufactured one piece Monobloc (also in the collection W.35-2016) which was designed to be affordable by all parts of society. This is due to the painstaking hand-made recreation of the form itself, utilising a human labour force of specialised skills, and multi-piece construction utilising glue and joinery as opposed to the instantaneous process of plastic injection moulding which allowed a one piece chair to be developed. Each chair in this edition is hand carved from pieces of elm wood in Shanghai by a group of craftsmen of various different skill types which include a type of Chinese joinery of slotting wood together with glue. The final result is then varnished. The labour and natural wood grain found in the Elm gives each chair a distinctive character over the anonymous aesthetic of the Monobloc. The chair was assigned an edition number of 34 from a series of 50.

Baas’ chair design challenges the idea of value and is full of the contradictions he found inherent in China (especially Shanghai) ranging from the cheap looking to the luxuriously expensive, high tech versus low tech, notions of originality versus the disposable copy, and the mass produced item versus the one-off hand-crafted. He has produced a chair which seems to embody all these contradictions as well as challenging the viewer to simply consider the aesthetic design of the humble plastic Monobloc when the material and production processes are removed from the intrinsic necessity of its production.

This chair was acquired as part of the Shekou Project, an international partnership between the V&A and China Merchant Shekou Holdings (CMSK) to open a new cultural platform called Design Society in Shekou. It was included in the inaugural exhibition, ‘Values of Design’, in the V&A Gallery at Design Society in a section exploring the critical issue of cost as a value in design.