Interview with Shih Wei Liu

Shih Wei Liu ("SWL") interviewed on Saturday, 16 May.

Could you please tell us about your experience as a designer, artist, architect or creator?

SWL : I have been working in the field of interior design for over fifteen years, leading MOG across projects spanning high-end residences, hotels, and large-scale commercial spaces. The combination of formal academic training and extensive hands-on practice gradually shaped my core understanding of design. What has truly defined my career is not the accumulation of projects, but the gradual formation of a coherent design philosophy — what we call "Cool Warmth": a precise and dynamic balance between rational spatial logic and genuine emotional resonance. This philosophy is expressed through MOG's three pillars: Modern, an evolving sense of the contemporary; Orchestrated, the discipline of precise spatial arrangement; and Gracious, a quiet pursuit of composed elegance.

How did you become a designer?

SWL : My path into design began in an unexpected place — a rented room during my university years. I found myself instinctively drawn to arranging everyday objects, choosing bedding, attending to the small details that most people overlook. Without consciously planning it, that room became a place where friends gathered naturally and returned repeatedly. Their presence made me realize, for the first time, that I had a genuine instinct for shaping atmosphere. That recognition led me to seek out formal interior design education while still an undergraduate. Graduate studies followed, and through that combination of academic rigor and hands-on practice, I was able to transform what began as a sensory intuition into the professional foundation that MOG is built upon today. I did not choose design as a career path so much as discover that it was already what I was doing.

What are your priorities, technique and style when designing?

SWL : At MOG, we advance every project through three core priorities. The first is spatial intelligence: before any aesthetic decision is made, we analyze how people move through a space, where light falls, and whether the floor plan genuinely supports the way the client lives. In Living Gallery, this meant completing a detailed daylight distribution analysis and circulation study before a single wall was touched. The second is material precision: we develop material palettes through physical sampling rather than digital rendering alone, because the eye reads warmth and texture differently on an actual surface than on a screen. The third is restraint — the strict discipline of ensuring that every element in a space can justify its own existence. We design backgrounds, not centerpieces. When the background is precisely calibrated, what the client values most — their art, their books, their collection — naturally becomes the focal point.

Which emotions do you feel when designing?

SWL : The emotional state I most consistently maintain throughout the design process can be described as composed engagement — the embodiment of "Cool Warmth" itself. When listening to a client, I hold a certain objective detachment: I am trying to hear what they genuinely need, not simply what they say they want. When translating those needs into spatial form, I engage deeply with their lived experience. The tension between those two states — analytical distance and genuine empathy — is where I do my best work. The moment I find most exciting is when spatial logic and material language arrive at the same answer: as in Living Gallery, where the structural decision to remove the central bedroom and create a circular circulation loop simultaneously delivered the light, warmth, and openness the client had described in words. When logic and feeling converge, I know the design direction is correct.

What particular aspects of your background shaped you as a designer?

SWL : Several non-design competencies have been as formative as my technical training. The most significant is the capacity for deep listening. Interior design is inherently a translation discipline — you take something that exists in a person's life and memory and convert it into spatial language. That process requires the ability to hear not only what a client articulates, but what they cannot quite put into words. My academic background gave me structural frameworks; years of practice serving diverse clients across residential and hospitality projects gave me a human vocabulary. Another formative influence came from studying different spatial typologies in response to specific project needs. The client of Living Gallery had an extensive collection, and his spatial requirements — maximum display flexibility, precise lighting quality, a layout that could be adjusted over time — closely aligned with the operational logic of museums and galleries. It was that specific brief that drove me to systematically study exhibition space design and translate its methods into a residential language. This cross-typology thinking has since become one of the most central methods in my work. The founding of MOG, and the commitment to a design-led model — not a construction service that offers design, but a consultancy where rigorous design thinking is the core offering — has been the most defining decision of my career.

What is your growth path? What are your future plans? What is your dream design project?

SWL : My most immediate plan is to develop the Living Gallery approach into a more systematic and transferable design framework. The circular circulation strategy, the modular display system, the gallery-grade lighting specification — these are not solutions invented for a single client, but principles that can be tested and refined across many more residential projects, particularly in compact urban apartments where the tension between display and comfort becomes even more acute. I also hope MOG will continue to deepen its commitment to what I would call inhabited exhibition design — borrowing not the aesthetic appearance of galleries, but the internal operational logic of how exhibition spaces work. My dream project would be a genuinely complex high-end residential or boutique hospitality commission: a client with an extensive and diverse collection, a space with challenging structural constraints, requiring a complete and elegant resolution between display precision, residential comfort, and the given architectural conditions. That level of complexity is exactly the kind of work I most want to take on.

What are your advices to designers who are at the beginning of their career?

SWL : The most important thing I would tell a young designer is this: learn to listen before you learn to design. The technical skills — drafting, material knowledge, spatial planning — are learnable and will develop with practice. What is genuinely difficult to cultivate, and far more valuable, is the ability to understand another person's life with both warmth and objectivity simultaneously, and to hold that understanding throughout the process of translating it into space. I would also caution against the temptation to develop a personal style too early. Style is an outcome, not a starting point. It grows naturally from repeated, serious engagement with real problems for real people. The designers I most respect are recognizable not because they apply the same visual language to every project, but because they consistently ask the same depth of questions. Invest in your process. The aesthetic will follow.

You are truly successful as a designer, what do you suggest to fellow designers, artists and architects?

SWL : The practice I would most strongly recommend is what I call strategic empathy — deeply understanding a client's history, habits, and genuine needs, and applying clear, objective judgment in transforming that understanding into spatial form. Sensitivity gives design its warmth. Logic ensures that warmth never becomes indulgence. Holding both in precise balance is the hardest thing a designer can develop, and the most necessary. Beyond that, I would encourage designers to resist the pressure to produce work that photographs well at the expense of work that lives well. The most meaningful test of a space is not how it reads in a single image, but how it supports a person's way of living across every hour of every day, across years. Design for time, not for the moment of completion.

What is your day to day look like?

SWL : A typical working day begins with project review — going through the current status of active commissions, covering spatial planning documents, material specification sheets, contractor coordination, and client correspondence. The mornings tend to be dedicated to focused design thinking: concept development, floor plan refinement, material palette decisions. The afternoons more often involve client meetings, site visits, and collaboration with specialist craftspeople. I read design publications and research regularly — not to follow trends, but to maintain a broad reference base. What I find most energizing on any given day is the moment when a decision that seemed purely technical — a proportion adjustment, a lighting correction — reveals its full emotional consequence. Those moments of convergence between logic and feeling are what give the work its genuine meaning.

How do you keep up with latest design trends? To what extent do design trends matter?

SWL : I engage with design trends primarily as information rather than direction. Knowing what is current in the field — what materials are being widely adopted, what spatial typologies are emerging, what conversations are happening internationally — is necessary for maintaining professional awareness. But at MOG, we do not design toward trends. We design toward people. The Living Gallery approach draws on decades of accumulated museum and gallery design thinking; what made it relevant was not its trendiness, but its precise fit to a specific client's life and needs. That said, trends are worth studying because they often encode genuine cultural shifts in how people want to live. The current broad interest in flexible, adaptable spaces reflects something real about how people's lives and relationships with their homes are changing. Understanding that underlying shift is valuable. Following its surface expression is less so.

How do you know if a product or project is well designed? How do you define good design?

SWL : The first thing I look for is internal consistency. I ask whether every element within the space can justify its own existence, and whether all the elements speak to one another. Only when that condition is met does a design become a coherent whole, rather than a collection of individually attractive objects without collective purpose. Beyond consistency, I ask whether the design genuinely supports the life of the person who inhabits it — not in a general or generic way, but in specific response to who that person actually is. A well-designed space makes the client's particular way of living more possible, more pleasurable, and more fully expressed. Good design, at its core, is a precise response to a real human condition — practiced with rational methodology, but always guided by genuine care.

How do you decide if your design is ready?

SWL : A design is ready when I can no longer identify any element whose removal would improve the whole. That is a high threshold, and in practice it means that the completion of every project is a negotiation between the ideal and the achievable within real constraints of time, budget, and construction. What I look for specifically is whether the space is doing what it was designed to do — not what it looks like in isolation, but how it behaves when inhabited. In Living Gallery, the final test was whether the client's collection genuinely came forward in the space, and whether the architecture appropriately receded. When I visited the completed apartment and saw the client's film posters, books, and art fully presented and correctly illuminated within the environment we had designed together, that was the moment I knew the design had fulfilled its brief. When the owner, rather than the designer, becomes the most clearly visible presence in the space — the design is complete.

What is your biggest design work?

SWL : Living Gallery is the most important work of my career to date, but not for reasons of scale or recognition. It is a 58-square-metre apartment in Taipei — by any objective measure, not a large project. What makes it significant to me is that it was the first time I felt every layer of design decision — spatial logic, material selection, lighting specification, collection display system — genuinely speaking to one another and forming a complete statement. It was also the first full verification of MOG's design philosophy of Cool Warmth, carried through from the first concept to completion: rational spatial judgment and genuine emotional warmth not compromising each other, but mutually reinforcing. Every designer has one work that is truly their own declaration — not the largest project, but the most honest one. Living Gallery is that work for me.

Who is your favourite designer?

SWL : Among the designers I most admire, Poul Cadovius holds a particular place — his modular wall-mounted system articulated something fundamental about how storage and display can be architectural rather than merely functional: adjustable and extendable rather than fixed and permanent. That philosophy directly influenced the shelving approach in Living Gallery. More broadly, I am drawn to designers who understood that restraint is a form of generosity — that giving a person's collection the right conditions to be clearly seen is a more profound design act than imposing a dramatic formal statement. In terms of spatial thinking, I consistently return to how Japanese residential design handles the relationship between openness and intimacy: how a carefully considered threshold can make a small space feel simultaneously private and expansive. That spatial intelligence deeply informs the way I think about urban apartment design.

Would you tell us a bit about your lifestyle and culture?

SWL : I live and work in Taipei. Taipei is a high-density city where most people live within relatively limited space, yet it simultaneously sustains an extremely active cultural life — galleries, independent bookstores, music scenes, film culture — all of which have deeply shaped my understanding of the relationship between people and the objects they live with. Many of my clients are serious collectors who have accumulated meaningful objects throughout their lives in the city, yet rarely have a space that can genuinely carry those collections. That reality gives my work a specific cultural coordinate: design is not serving an abstract ideal of living, but responding to a very Taipei-specific tension — within limited space, how do you make the things a person truly values visible.

Would you tell us more about your work culture and business philosophy?

SWL : At MOG, the fundamental commitment is to a design-led model. The core service we offer is not construction management, but strategic design thinking and objective professional guidance. That distinction is critical to the quality of what we produce. Every project begins with a period of deep client research — not simply understanding what they want the space to look like, but understanding their actual way of living, their collecting habits, how they move through space, and what makes them comfortable or uncomfortable. We maintain a clear balance between rational cost discipline and aesthetic pursuit. A space does not need to seek approval — it only needs to support life quietly and precisely when it is truly being lived in. The collaborators I seek — whether within the studio or among our specialist craftspeople and contractors — share that same commitment to precision, and understand that the quality of the final work depends directly on the quality of every working relationship involved in producing it.

What are your philanthropic contributions to society as a designer, artist and architect?

SWL : I believe a designer's most fundamental responsibility to society is expressed through the quality and honesty of each individual project. The question that Living Gallery addresses — how to genuinely carry and display what a person values most within the constraints of a limited urban home — is not one client's personal concern. It is a spatial challenge shared by many people living in cities. When a design project can clearly demonstrate that this kind of problem has a solution, and that the solution does not depend on large floor area or high budget but on clear thinking and precise design judgment — I believe that in itself constitutes a contribution to the social value of the design profession. Submitting this project to an international competition was also motivated by the hope that these ideas might enter a broader professional conversation: that what residential design can borrow from exhibition spaces is not only an aesthetic, but an entire operational logic of how space works.

What positive experiences you had when you attend the A’ Design Award?

SWL : Participating in the A' Design Award has been genuinely meaningful at several levels. Three benefits stand out. First, the international evaluation framework provided rigorous external validation that the design logic of Living Gallery — its spatial strategies, lighting specifications, material decisions — holds up against the widest possible frame of reference, not only within the context of Taiwanese residential design. The value of that confirmation lies precisely in its independence. Second, the process of preparing the submission prompted a depth of documentation and articulation that has been professionally clarifying. Translating intuitive design decisions into explicit, communicable principles strengthened my own understanding of what the Living Gallery approach actually is and how it can be further developed. Third, the recognition has opened conversations with clients and collaborators who might not otherwise have encountered MOG's work — and those conversations are already informing the direction of the next generation of projects. Being recognized specifically within the Interior Space and Exhibition Design category felt exactly right for a project that deliberately positions itself between those two disciplines.

Shih Wei Liu Profile