When the doors opened on Forced Perspective design Exhibition, the hotly anticipated group show headlining NYCxDESIGN 2025, few pieces created a stir quite like Dream Tower, the newest work in the growing Lost Stories collection by New-York-based furniture designer Yuxuan Huang. Curated by independent designers Caleb Ferris, Kiki Goti, NJ Roseti, and Vincent Staropoli, Forced Perspective assembled fifteen of the city’s most forward-thinking practices to explore how design grapples with misinformation, distortion, and polarized worldviews. Huang’s contribution—a luminous stacked-volume lamp that fuses reclaimed wood, hand-painted paper, and bamboo armatures—proved an anchoring point for the show’s nuanced conversation about truth, memory, and material narrative. 

Forced Perspective took its name from the optical illusion that compels viewers to accept manipulated reality. The curators invited practitioners whose work already probes alternative readings of familiar forms. Participants ranged from sculptural provocateurs Kim Mupangilaï and Forma Rosa Studio to conceptual storytellers like Office of Tangible Space. Huang’s Dream Tower—an elegant vertical totem built from the dismantled remnants of a century-old cabinet—offered a quietly poetic counterpoint. By positioning laboriously re-skinned surfaces against freshly exposed joinery, the lamp revealed one object’s multiple pasts in a single gesture and asked viewers to question the completeness of any given story.

Huang’s fascination with hidden histories traces back to her childhood in Chengdu, where long, humid summers and evenings of paper-cutting with her grandfather instilled a love for timeworn texture and iterative craft. After earning a BFA in Designed Objects at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA in Furniture Design at Rhode Island School of Design, she formalized those instincts in the 2023 launch of the Lost Stories collection—an ongoing body of work that deconstructs thrift-store furniture, liberates aged surfaces, and re-collages them into minimalist new structures. Each piece preserves dents, scuffs, and handwritten carpenter’s marks as active design elements, affirming that “every person, every object has a story waiting to be told.” The series debuted in Milan at SaloneSatellite 2024 with Cabinet Iand quickly captivated international media from The New York Times to Sight Unseen, which hailed it as one of the fair’s standout projects. 

Dream Tower marks Huang’s first foray into lighting within the Lost Stories universe. The lamp’s silhouette stacks graduated rectangular volumes, each clad in translucent, hand-painted paper that diffuses a warm glow and subtly reveals the woodgrain and tool scars beneath. Huang developed the layered paper technique during a spring 2025 residency at Anderson Ranch Arts Center, where she studied Chinese lantern-making and kite constructions to refine bamboo ribs capable of supporting delicate skins. The base—salvaged oak from an 1890s chest of drawers—anchors the composition while reinforcing the collection’s commitment to rescued material.

Within hours of opening night, Dream Tower emerged as a press darling. AN Interior highlighted its “tender amalgam of ruin and rebirth,” singling it out in a roundup of NYCxDESIGN’s best new work.Major design outlets including Dezeen, Galerie Magazine, and Sight Unseen likewise featured the piece in their festival coverage, placing Huang alongside established names in the industry. Momentum intensified on social media, where gallerists shared videos of Dream Towercycling through dawn-to-dusk light temperatures—an effect Huang calibrated to mimic the shifting hues of Sichuan mountain skies.

What sets Huang’s work apart within Forced Perspective is its insistence that design’s role in an information-saturated age is not simply to expose distortion but to heal it. By presenting viewers with artifacts whose scars are celebrated rather than erased, Dream Tower reframes brokenness as a site of communal empathy. Curator Caleb Ferris noted in his exhibition essay that Huang “constructs a gentle rebuttal to cynicism, reminding us that fragmented truths can still cohere into something of quiet beauty.”

Following the exhibition’s run, representatives from leading collectible galleries—including Verso Works and Adorno Design—entered acquisition talks for limited editions of Dream Tower. Institutions, too, took notice: a curator from the Museum of Arts and Design in Manhattan confirmed interest in loaning the piece for a 2026 survey on contemporary craft narratives. The lamp’s success builds on earlier market validation: Chair I and Cabinet II sold to private collectors after their outing at Collectible New York 2024, while Table I joined a hospitality project by boutique studio Office of Tangible Space. 

Huang hints that the collection will soon branch into modular shelving systems that integrate salvaged glass and lead came. She envisions “rooms that breathe with the past,” where lighting, seating, and storage converse through shared material ancestry. 

For NYCxDESIGN, Dream Tower and the broader Forced Perspective program underscore the festival’s evolution from trend barometer to critical think tank. By foregrounding works that probe how narratives—visual, political, or material—are constructed, the show reminded visitors that design is as much about storytelling as it is about form. And for Huang, the exhibition crystallized a core belief: that honoring the incomplete truths embedded in objects can illuminate paths toward more honest, empathetic futures.