Gu Yeli's antique Chinese wooden bench outfitted with colorful pompoms.

Gu collected broken or abandoned chairs and benches dumped in Shanghai's maze of alleys, and reworked these commonplace items into striking and distinctive furniture.

Upcycling is also a theme in the hand-stitched wallflowers created by Yang Fan, which are large rectangular cloths hung on a wall, with scrap cloth and pompoms stitched into arrangements of flowers and smiley faces.

On a visit to southern China's clothes-manufacturing factories, Yang was shocked to see thousands of pieces of cloth discarded. She methodically collected what she could and stitched the cast-offs into brightly colored panels.

Yet a third theme Fawcett notices is modernity, led by the double-skinned stainless steel panels Zhang Zhoujie makes from parametric design - a digital scripting method that creates designs using computer models.