Rowena Liangru Lu

Serious Play is a furniture and home accessory series Rowena began in 2022 and has since developed into a personal language of material and form. As Rowena reflected in 2022: “… After moving my ‘beads lab’ from RCA to home, I grabbed whatever I had that could be used as moulds: wok, pan, baking tray, chair legs, lamp shades, coke cans, wine bottles… I borrowed shapes from them as if borrowing part of their soul — as if preserving fragments of my daily life.”

The obsession with casting beads on daily objects lasted. Since 2024, Rowena has considered this way of making, which she invented, as a new craft, with what she calls the very “natural” materials of the 21st century: plastic. With this mindset, Rowena started to borrow tools and techniques often used in well-established crafts, like ceramics and glass-making, to expand the potential of plastic beads crafting.