Tongqi Lu

Tongqi Lu is a designer from Shanghai and the founder of Tickle Quo, the studio and brand she started in 2020, whose first collection arrived a year later. She works across furniture, objects and branding, and her subject is well-being: fog-covered mountains and the slow sea set against the speed of a city, turned into pieces meant to restore the attention urban life erodes.

Her best-known work is Slowly Rising, a glassware collection made for Tickle Quo and shown by Dezeen Showroom in 2023, where the wabi-sabi reading of imperfection is carried by colour and thickness rather than applied decoration. The same vocabulary runs through the furniture and lighting pieces Drop, Banyan, Citron, Trace, Hermitage and Stay and the small objects of the 7Pence series, developed between her Shanghai office and a deliberately small workshop network.