As important in Asia as the Salone Internazionale del Mobile is in Europe, Guangzhou Design Week offered something out of the ordinary at last December’s edition. Attendees were enthralled by a dizzying exhibition put on by a local design firm. “We demonstrated that everything in the world should be examined from multiple perspectives. There are always two sides to every story,” design director Yingkai Xie says. To attract visitors, he housed the show in an attention-grabbing pavilion of a mere 90 square feet. Its steel frame, mostly welded on-site, jutted out at extreme angles both at ground level and overhead. A translucent plastic membrane stretched over certain segments, while other panels were a silvery glass that simultaneously reflected and revealed. Inside, photographs and video of the firm’s projects, from trop-ical resorts to urban workplaces, looped on a bank of monitors. Another wall, this one mirrored, caught the reflection of Chinese characters stenciled on the floor to convey a philosophical enigma: “Everything is nothing. Nothing is everything.” As he explains, “The effect could work because the characters are perfectly symmetrical.” That’s a lot more thought-provoking than a tote bag full of fliers.