Profile: Shengtao Shen – Real Leather Design Competitions

Shengtao Shen

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Hello, my name is Shengtao Shen. I am currently studying architecture at MIT, and I previously studied landscape architecture in China. My work moves between architecture, product design, furniture, wearable objects, and art. I enjoy working directly with materials and discovering unexpected forms through making. I am especially interested in combining materials with very different qualities, such as soft leather and rigid metal, and exploring the tension created between them. I often begin with sketches and physical experiments, then develop the idea through cutting, bending, assembling, and repeated prototyping. Many of my projects are inspired by questions about identity, memory, coexistence, and contradiction. I like creating objects that feel unfamiliar but still connected to the body and everyday life. Through my work, I hope to turn abstract ideas and emotions into physical forms that people can see, touch, and experience.

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CHIMERA: Heterogeneity as a Condition of Becoming

Category: Accessories

Competitions: International

Chimera is a series of sculptural wearable works that examines heterogeneity through the transformation of leather. Rather than treating leather as a passive surface or a material of comfort, the series places it in direct tension with rigid, cold, and resistant structures. Its softness, warmth, flexibility, and tactile density are repeatedly stretched, restrained, pierced, folded, and redirected through contact with contrasting materials. The works are not designed primarily to demonstrate comfort, practicality, or conventional wearability. Instead, they treat contradiction as something that can be constructed and encountered physically. Each piece begins with a material conflict: soft against hard, organic against industrial, yielding against controlling. Through fastening, compression, suspension, penetration, and overlap, these opposing conditions gradually form unstable hybrid bodies. Across the series, leather never disappears into a seamless whole. It remains visibly distinct, carrying traces of pressure, deformation, and resistance. The contrasting structures do not simply support it; they challenge its behavior and alter its identity. Moving between accessory, armor, organism, and sculpture, Chimera does not attempt to resolve contradiction. It gives contradiction a body, using the encounter between leather and heterogeneous materials to reveal coexistence as a process of mutual transformation.