The Shape of Things | The Panafold Issue 04
Photo by Greta van der Star for The Panafold
“Waka Waka pieces speak with quiet confidence, never insisting upon a particular styling or use case—less cheeky than intelligent; imbued with wit and presence. Okuda expertly draws personality out of rudimentary materials and forms, without ever obscuring their essence.”
Inside Shin Okuda’s furniture design studio, on a quiet residential street in Los Angeles’ Atwater Village, there’s a wall lined with planks of colorful laminate plywood. Mossy green and goldenrod. Lilac atop crimson. Yves Klein blue, robin's egg blue, the perfect shade of buttercream. These are off-cuts and scraps from past projects, but the effect is akin to an Imi Knoebel or Blinky Palermo composition. In Okuda’s workshop—where material use is treated with the same thoughtful reverence and curiosity as form—waste is almost a moral offense.
For the last fifteen years, Okuda—the designer behind the furniture brand known as Waka Waka—has been amassing a distinct yet discreet cult status in L.A. and beyond. His handcrafted furniture and functional objects convey a devotion to minimalism, conscious proportion, and craftsmanship—punctuated by the surprise of a cylinder here, a block of saturated color there.
Okuda, who was born in Fukuoka, Japan, arrived in Los Angeles in the late ‘90s. He found work at a flower shop in Little Tokyo while attending night school to learn English. Eventually, he began working at a restaurant in Chinatown, just steps from Chung King Road, which was home to a thriving contemporary gallery scene. There, he forged connections with local artists like Jorge Pardo and T. Kelly Mason, both of whom would hire him to assist with fabrication. Asked if he had a background in craft—something that might have given him the confidence to dive headfirst into studio work with well-known artists—he shakes his head. “I was always handy, and I helped a carpenter friend after college in their workshop,” he tells me.