Taiwan Today

Using the mortise and tenon woodworking technique, the Fan brothers join the natural and the manmade, the old and the new.

Traffic near Jhudong on Provincial Highway 3 is busy on weekends, with buses and cars carrying tourists to in , which is popular for its persimmon and strawberry gardens as well as Hakka culture and cuisine. A few decades ago, traffic was also heavy, but only on weekdays, when trucks transported logs from Beipu, which was once a center for the area's timber industry. Logging has been banned for two decades now, and related trades have mostly disappeared. But those who pull over at the Smangus Workshop a few kilometers from Beipu may still find traces of the area's logging past.

Fan Yang-tien and Fan Yang-wu run a workshop that makes wooden furniture. Born and raised in Beipu, the brothers accompanied their father to logging stations when they were children and learned a great deal about wood and logging from him. Today, visitors to their workshop are often invited to have a cup of coffee and to chat about Beipu, logging, furniture, politics or other subjects. While chatting with the brothers, however, it is hard for visitors not to notice the uniqueness of the furniture they make. A dresser, for example, uses five different types of wood for the faces of its five drawers. A table's design incorporates angular, modern elements into the shape of the original tree trunk.

Third Generation

The Fans are the third generation of their family's wood-related business. Their grandfather ran a shop in Beipu in the 1950s that made wooden farming tools, doors and windows. Their father, Fan Guang-ming, did not craft items from wood, but ran a small lumber yard. However, as the government began to consider banning logging on public land in the early 1980s, Fan Guang-ming shifted to making wooden furniture and opened Guang Ming Wooden Furniture in 1984, a move that proved prescient when the logging ban went into effect in 1985.

The furniture Guang Ming turned out in its early years was very simple. Large pieces of wood were mostly kept in their original shapes. After some cleaning, sanding and polishing, they became tables, chairs or screens. Although it did not require much in the way of carpentry skill or design, the type of furniture Guang Ming produced was very popular at the time. Profits were good and the father and sons had to work long hours to meet demand. "My 'homework' was sanding and polishing the wood," Yang-tien says. "I wasn't happy at all because it seemed I was going to spend the rest of my life doing that." Yang-tien's dream, as he recalls, was to become a professional racecar driver when he entered the department of vehicle engineering at a local vocational high school. But the more he worked with wood, the more he appreciated and was fascinated by the material. Although he never realized his racing dream, the knowledge he gained about machines and electronics at the vocational school served him well when setting up and maintaining machinery in the workshop.

Boom Goes Bust

The market for high-end furniture was hit hard by the collapse of the stock market in 1990. The domestic furniture industry also declined with the advent of cheap imports and rising production costs. Many manufacturers moved overseas and many others went out of business. When Yang-tien returned from his compulsory military service in 1990, the market was already in decline, and by the time Yang-wu returned from his service in 1993, the market had hit bottom. Yang-wu, who left for to study art after junior high school, was persuaded by his brother to give up his dream of becoming a painter to join the family business.

The diligence of the father and sons, however, did not reverse their fortunes. "We worked hard and long, but that wasn't a solution," Yang-tien says. "There simply wasn't much business no matter how productive we were." To make matters worse, Fan Guang-ming was diagnosed with liver cancer and passed away in 1995.

The brothers decided to keep the shop running and changed its name to Smangus Workshop in 1997. Yang-tien explains that Smangus is the name of the Atayal tribe that lives near the forest their father felled trees in and took the brothers to. In addition to spurring childhood memories, Smangus represents a simple and natural lifestyle to the brothers. "Our designs have little to do with Atayal culture, but their lifestyle is what we'd like to evoke in our furniture," Yang-tien says.

For several years after their father passed away, the brothers tried to bring in more business by diversifying their product lines. They continued making the style of furniture their father had made, started to sell imports, restored vintage pieces and made reproductions of antique furniture. The brothers explain that at the time, a lot of damaged furniture could still be collected from old houses or military dependents' villages that had been torn down in favor of renewal projects. Some of the old wood could be reused, and some of the broken furniture could still have years of life left after being repaired.

Lessons Learned

Two things the brothers learned from working on old furniture have proven to be of great value in their business. The first lesson was about the different styles of furniture made at different times by different schools of design. The second was one of the most important and complicated techniques for making high-end furniture--the mortise and tenon joint. Much of the technique, which has been passed down by successive generations of woodworkers, was lost when nails and glue reduced the popularity of mortise and tenon joints. However, many examples can still be seen in old furniture. "Those are things we didn't need to know when we were working on my father's furniture," Yang-tien says. "But they're things we have to know if we want to stay in this trade."

To experiment with what they had learned, the brothers came up with some of their own designs. The idea of expanding their product lines, however, did not help the business much. Finally, in 1998, they decided to focus exclusively on their own designs. "Furniture is like fashion in that consumer preferences constantly change," Yang-tien says. "Our small operation can never keep up with the changes, so the only way out was to establish our own style." The decision turned out to be a wise one. The brothers first exhibited their designs in Beipu in 2002 and later showcased them in Hsinchu and . Five years later, Smangus Workshop has become a recognized brand name in the local furniture market.

Opposites Attract

Simply put, the brothers' unique style is a combination of the natural and the manmade, the traditional and the modern--elements that appear to be contradictory, but which are well balanced and harmonious in the Fans' designs. "While wood is a product that comes from nature, a little artificial touch makes it fit into a manmade space such as a living room," Yang-tien says. The face of a table, for example, can be half solid wood and half glass, to evoke the dichotomy of fullness and emptiness. Or, half of a desk can look and be structured like an ordinary office desk, while the other half retains the natural shape of a large piece of wood. For such works, the original shape of the wood inspires the overall design. Sometimes, a piece of wood stays in the workshop for several years before a design is settled upon.

The materials for the Fans' designs include local and imported wood, wood from damaged furniture and, occasionally, metal and glass. A Smangus design may use several kinds of wood with different colors, hardness and grain patterns. Regardless of the material, the mortise and tenon joint is used to connect all parts. Yang-tien explains that there are hundreds of types of mortise and tenon joints. Joints of different shapes and sizes are used to connect different parts, and the angles, strengths and the materials of parts that are to be connected all need to be taken into consideration. A simple chair, for example, may use three different kinds of joints. It takes a lot more work and much longer to fashion such joints than to simply use nails and screws, but the Fan brothers believe this is how a piece of good furniture should be built, though fewer and fewer of today's consumers know of and appreciate their craftsmanship.

Although it started out with only the brothers themselves, their workshop has increased its workforce with another four craftsmen and six assistants so that the brothers can focus on designing. When the Fans have a design idea, it is first drawn out and discussed. The younger of the brothers, who worked for fewer years in their father's shop and has less experience in furniture manufacturing, sometimes comes up with projects that are impractical. "A chair that looks great doesn't necessarily sit well," says the elder of the two. "While a piece of good furniture has to be visually appealing, it's of equal importance that it be perfectly functional."

The Bottom Line

Yang-wu admits that he can sometimes be carried away by the artistic aspect of a design and forget about the necessity of keeping costs under control. The brothers have made it a habit to write down the cost of each piece on the wood itself as a reference for the minimum price a finished article of furniture should sell for.

The execution of each piece is a long process of communication between the designers and the craftsmen. Usually, the workshop can make between 10 and 20 pieces a month and sells about the same number. With this relatively low volume, it is not surprising that Smangus furniture is expensive. Chairs cost at least NT$10,000 (US$300) and dining tables are priced well above NT$100,000 (US$3,000). The price of each piece is based on the cost of raw materials and hours of labor, and the profit margin is actually very thin.

Casual visitors might be put off when they see the price tags, but the brothers do not worry about this since their sales targets are constrained by the limited production capacity of their workshop. Their biggest concern is a scarcity of skilled craftsmen. Currently, all the workshop's craftsmen are at least in their 50s and do not have many years left for the physically demanding work. Yang-tien recalls that there was no lack of craftsmen in the area during the logging heyday. The local vocational high school even had a carpentry department in those days. It is understandable that related professions faded away with the decline of logging, but what puzzles the Fan brothers is that it seems no young people are interested in the trade now, even though the workshop offers pay that is triple the amount one could earn by working at a restaurant or filling station.

But the Fans have no time to worry, as their days are fully occupied by buying and sorting materials, communicating with craftsmen and working on new designs. While both brothers enjoy chatting and brainstorming with local artists for design ideas, they have different sources of inspiration. Yang-wu likes to travel to experience different cultures, while Yang-tien often comes up with new ideas while reading.

One of Yang-tien's favorite furniture-related quotes is from Henry David Thoreau's Walden: "I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society." The Fan brothers, it seems, also occupy three chairs--the first for family heritage, the second for the woodworking tradition, and the third for a unique design philosophy.

http://www.smangus.com.tw

Write to Jim Hwang at jim@mail.gio.gov.tw