Reappropriating blonde wooden boxes, Naihan Li forms The Crates, a collection of modish, foldable furniture. Inspired by her own transient lifestyle, and by the millions of workers who migrate around China each year, Li’s outwardly simple containers fold open to reveal hidden wardrobes, bookshelves, beds and dressers. She questions the concept of dwelling while accommodating the requirements of a modern, mobile world. “All my creations are designed to improve the life I’m living right now,” says Li. “To do that you need to understand what life is about. It’s a process.”  Based in Caochangdi, an artist village that counts Ai Weiwei and curator Beatrice Leanza as tenants, Li is a Beijing local, but attended the Bartlett School of Architecture in London. All these diverse influences have come to inform her work––which she describes as being the meeting point of art, design and architecture––and this range has allowed her to participate in a slew of prestigious projects, from designing the Royal Kitchen restaurant inside Beijing’s Forbidden City to exhibiting at Milan Design Week in both 2010 and 2011. Her next series, I Am a Monument, rescales well-known structures down to the size of domestic furniture, turning the Pentagon into a bed and the Palm House at Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Garden into a terrarium. Li recounts visiting Chinese art collectors’ houses and finding them full of gargantuan sculptures. For her, the impulse to possess a colossal object—in this case, a building—is “very Chinese.” Li however, doesn’t subscribe to the ‘bigger is better’ mantra. Of her molded candles shaped like tall buildings that form a part of the series, she remarks: “It’s intriguing to see them burn.”