Created for Melbourne Design Week, DRD-01: Nothing explores absence as a material for design. Rather than filling rooms with objects, the installation uses light and suspended planes to reveal the space itself. Visitors are encouraged to slow down, becoming aware of their own movement and perception.

Across a series of domestic rooms, black and white planes hover between object and image. Some are illuminated with precision optics, casting shifting constellations across walls and floors. Others hang as delicate mobiles, where the slightest movement alters the relationship between transparency and shadow. Familiar architectural surfaces become active participants, continuously transformed by the presence of the viewer.

The work draws on a visual language of reduction, where geometric forms are stripped of representation and function. What first appears as a simple composition gradually unfolds into something layered and ambiguous. Rather than presenting a finished object, the installation creates conditions for contemplation, allowing perception itself to become the subject.

Positioned between installation, art and design, DRD-01: Nothing established ideas that continue to inform Studio Chen Lu's practice today: material restraint, the choreography of light, and the framing of emptiness as a space of possibility.