Chen Chen & Kai Williams

Chen Chen & Kai Williams is a designer duo based in Brooklyn. Since 2011, their studio has transformed industrial materials like concrete, stone, and resin into functional objects, treating production waste and scraps as intentional elements of their practice.

Chen Chen and Kai Williams make objects that turn industrial materials into unexpected forms. Their Brooklyn studio, founded in 2011, builds around material curiosity—casting concrete, polishing stone, working resin and wood in a shared space where the dust from one process mingles with the moisture of another. They think of their practice as an ecosystem. Scrap becomes keychains dipped in epoxy. Production waste is treated as evidence that time and effort went into it. The studio invents techniques and diverts common industrial supplies to off-label uses: real fruit molds for planters, hand-carved high-density polyethylene for dinnerware, metal wrapped around lighter bodies. The work moves between one-off collectible pieces and manufactured goods, but the through-line is always process—what the making itself reveals.