umum+ is a London and Hangzhou-based studio founded by curator Dan Huang and architect Shutong Fan in 2025 at their home in Kensal Green, London. We work across curation, spatial design, publication, object design, and situated research under one theme: Craft.
Craft is understood not as the preservation of tradition, but as a mindset for approaching the world. We attempt to reintroduce, recontextualise, regenerate, and readapt craft for a contemporary life context, bringing it to a wider audience who might not have been interested in craft before.
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We collaborate with a cross-disciplinary group of creatives: makers, artists, writers, graphic designers, architects, archaeologists, and filmmakers. Together, we translate overlooked materials, objects, and designs into curated encounters framed by displacement and recontextualisation. We approach design as a connective framework. Each project develops from attentive research into its cultural context, constructing a ground where stories surface and unfold through sustained dialogue.
umum+ grew from umum objects. The original idea was to adapt a private living space into a communal space for contemporary craft. Now, the practice has grown into an object gallery, umum objects, and a studio, umum+. The studio has been invited to host exhibitions and events in London, Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Hunan.
Our collaborators include: Saltriver Studio, Arisu Ange, Slowdance, Gegend Gallery, Common Divisor, Zephyrus Art, and Storyage.
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umum+ grew from umum objects. The original idea was to adapt a private living space into a communal space for contemporary craft. Now, the practice has grown into an object gallery, umum objects, and a studio, umum+. The studio has been invited to host exhibitions and events in London, Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Hunan.
Our collaborators include: Saltriver Studio, Arisu Ange, Slowdance, Gegend Gallery, Common Divisor, Zephyrus Art, and Storyage.
(Less...)
Project
- Used to Use #2: Garden, Kitchen, Game
- 7-day Wonder II: Isobel Napier
- 7-day Wonder I: Marian Bijlenga
- Drifting Home
- Ready-to-Pot
- British Household Curios
- Used to Use #1: British Silverware Curios
- Crafted Escapes
- The Art of Repetition
- umum x common divisior
- Reading Room #2
- Reading Room #1
- Zhàngwù: Youyou Wang
Library
Chen Bao: A Conversation with Clay and the Past
Contact
77 Fulham Palace, London, England, W6 8AF
Coming Soon
We welcome portfolios from graphic designers, architects, product designers, sound artists, construction consultants, stage designers, filmmakers, and craft researchers. Please share your work with us at hr@umumobjects.com
info@umumplus.com
Press
press@umumplus.com
Type: Exhibition
Venue: Koppel Collective,
NW1 8BB, London, UK
umum+ studio presents Lacquer Before Lacquer, the first solo exhibition of London-based sculptor and painter Miao Tan, at Koppel Collective from 4–6 September 2026.
Rather than introducing lacquer to a UK audience as a craft tradition with a glossary attached, the exhibition follows how Miao Tan encounters the material, argues with it, and is changed by it, so visitors can meet lacquer the way she did, without being told what to think of it first.
Rather than introducing lacquer to a UK audience as a craft tradition with a glossary attached, the exhibition follows how Miao Tan encounters the material, argues with it, and is changed by it, so visitors can meet lacquer the way she did, without being told what to think of it first.
The exhibition opens with Tan's own account of encountering raw lacquer for the first time, tapping trees in a working lacquer forest in Chengkou, Chongqing, China, and tasting the sap straight from the cut. "It hit instantly, an intense, clean fragrance unlike anything I'd known," she recalls.
"I couldn't stop thinking about it afterwards. I understood, suddenly, why people call it addictive." Lacquer is introduced here through first-person experience: sensory, physical, and unresolved.
"What I love about lacquer was never the repetition of applying it," Tan says. "It's what happens after: a transformation I can't control, that leaves me hopeful, uneasy, doubtful, and thrilled all in the same breath. That unpredictability belongs to the material, not to me."
The exhibition closes by returning to where Tan's relationship with lacquer first began. Her earliest lacquer works, They, Them, Their I & II, a tower of lacquer-coated hats and a row of stiffened stockings holding themselves upright with no structure inside them, drew on Judith Butler's writing on gender performativity, asking whether lacquer's slow, irreversible hardening could stand in for the way society hardens fluid identities into fixed roles.
Seen again here, that question has widened. As Tan kept working the material, watching it seep, resist, and set, fibre changing at first contact, each new layer altering weight, colour, and rigidity in a transformation with no way back, she found herself less interested in what lacquer could represent than in what it was actually doing.
The metaphor she started with gave way to something closer to observation, and the question no longer rests on the object worn, but on the discipline of hardening itself.
Team
Artist: Miao Tan
Visual Design: Siying Cui