Biography
Before receiving his Master of Design from Domus Academy in 2003, Hong Kong-born Kitmen immigrated to Canada with his parents at the age of 14 and spent a decade living in Vancouver where he completed high school and graduated from the art institute Royal Oak College, after that he also took part in an architectural research study in San Francisco. During his time in Europe, he had the opportunity to work with international brands such as Artemide, Ermenegildo Zegna, Oregon Scientific, Mitsubishi and Gas etc.
As a Chinese-Canadian, Kitmen epitomizes the encounter between Eastern and Western visual culture at its most inspired. His design work is an ongoing search for the ideal balance between distilled forms of Eastern culture, beauty and tradition, and the experimentalism of modern Western visual culture. His objects harmoniously blend the archetypal imagery of traditional East and the functional orientation of Western graphic art. For Kitmen, tradition was modernity, and simple, functional form was the spirituality that reveals itself when the superfluous is removed so that object design again becomes an elegant form of interaction.
Kitmen was the winner of The New York Art Directors Club Young Guns Prize in 2009 as well as The Perspective magazine 40 Under 40 Award in 2008. He was also selected as one of the 36 most essential young Asian designers by Designnet of Seoul in 2010 and featured as one of the four emerging product designers by Elle Deco of Hong Kong in 2008.
姜傑文, 華裔設計師, 14歲隨父母移居溫哥華, 在當地中學畢業後於藝術學院Royal Oak College接受正規的設計訓練, 其後亦曾在美國三藩市居住及研究生態建築學。 2003年前往米蘭入讀Domus設計學院, 在設計師Stefano Giovannoni及建築師Hani Rashid的監督下取得工業設計學碩士。 在歐洲期間, 姜氏曾參與多個國際品牌的產品設計研究項目, 包括Artemide, Ermenegildo Zegna, Oregon Scientific, 三菱電器及Gas等。