When Tom Huang looks at a chair, he doesn’t just see a place to sit.

He sees an intimate object that connects everyone who has ever rested there, waited there, dreamed there. He imagines the sentimental value it might hold for a family. He senses the hands of the artisan who crafted its legs and seat and back.

Once in a while, he also recalls a little step stool he created in third grade.

“I cobbled this thing from pieces of lumber that my dad had sitting around that already had a groove cut in them. I put a board in there, and so the idea was that you could sit on it and put your shoes on the board,” says Huang, assistant professor of industrial design at Kansas University. “In some ways I was already thinking about the ritual of getting dressed, and how can an object enable that ritual.

“It wasn’t particularly sturdy or beautiful to look at, but I think it was definitely an object that relates to behavior, which is ultimately what I think furniture work is about.”

That childhood project marked Huang’s first foray into an art form that would become his life’s work. Now – just five years removed from graduate school – the affirmations that he chose the right path keep pouring in. His latest encouragement: The American Craft Council named Huang one of 14 Searchlight Artists, an honor newly created to recognize emerging artists on the national scene.

“My jaw hit the ground when I heard about this,” says Huang, 34.

KU design department chairman Gregory Thomas says the honor is well-deserved.

“He’s a very gifted designer and artist,” Thomas says of Huang. “His craft work is excellent – his attention to detail, his creativity and what he does with materials.”

Combining cultures

Huang works mostly with wood, but bronze, steel and acrylic make cameos, too. They show up in cabinets, beds, mirrors, chairs, benches and sculptures that he handcrafts in his home studio in Old West Lawrence.

Although he uses power tools – table saw, jointer, planer, drill press – Huang says his work bench and hand tools are his most valuable resources.

“I have a mentor who refuses to introduce a router to his work because it’s noisy and it changes the environment and it’s dusty. I would agree,” he says. “I think a lot of the stuff I do, when it comes down to it, the joy is when I’m doing the handwork.

“It’s just that level of engaging the materials, which hopefully is communicated in the final piece.”

Huang often borrows glimmers of inspiration from his students, and he frequently finds muses in nature and the sensuality of the physical world. But one of the ongoing motivations in his work is ethnicity. Growing up in Wilmington, Del., the son of Chinese immigrants, he found himself constantly searching for ways to reconcile his Asian and American backgrounds.

Huang’s teachers were always encouraging him to think for himself, while at home his parents told him to respect his elders and listen to them without question.

“I had to somehow understand and learn from traditions and experiences that my parents had,” he says, “but at the same time I could really see that in American culture, what makes our nation strong is that we’re innovative and strive for new things.”

Huang continues to look for answers through his art. Most recently, he has been weaving and binding bamboo, a material iconically linked to Asian culture.

“As I’m binding things together that have different material qualities,” he says, “I’m discovering that when they come together the attributes that each material brings can really be celebrated.”

Pushing boundaries

Huang’s parents wanted him to be a doctor or an engineer. He humored them for a while, but realized he thrived on more creative pursuits when, as a high school junior, he nearly failed biology at a Harvard summer program because he had his nose buried in a sketch book.

He enrolled in the architecture program at Washington University in St. Louis, where he soon discovered he wasn’t interested in designing skyscrapers or housing developments – “I gravitated more and more to the intimacy of the human scale,” he says – and he couldn’t bear the thought of sitting in front a computer all day, clicking a mouse to operate architectural software.

“I like making things,” he says.

So that’s what he did. After graduation, Huang worked in the San Francisco Bay-area design community for six years – not just designing, but also fabricating and installing – for clients like Sun Microsystems, Disney Imagineering and Sony Entertainment.

After applying three times, he was accepted to the Rhode Island School of Design’s studio furniture program, which admits just six or seven grad students a year. He snagged his KU job shortly after completing his MFA.

Huang exhibits work at Wexler Gallery in Philadelphia and Shidoni Gallery in Santa Fe, N.M. He also was featured recently in American Craft magazine, whose editorial staff recommended him for the Searchlight honor.

“What we liked about Tom, other than just his beautiful work, is how submerged he is in academia and the influence he has on other artists, other teachers – and his dedication,” says Mary Fichter, of the American Craft Council.

It helps, too, that his work tests the limits of traditional furniture.

“It’s very contemporary,” Fichter says. “The council and collectors at large are interested in investing in an artist who’s constantly creating new work and really pushing the boundaries.”