The Artist Making Sculptures From Scraps

We Want the Funk

Though a staple of Chinese and Taiwanese home cooking, fermented tofu, or furu, has never had the stateside appeal of other preserved soybean products, such as miso and gochujang. Made by soaking soybean curds in a brine of rice wine, water, salt and spices, furu (also romanized to “fuyu” and “doufuru”) is now being embraced by Asian American chefs who are finding clever ways to capitalize on its specific tang, mild sweetness and intense umami. At Bonnie’s, Calvin Eng’s Williamsburg palace of Cantonese American food, and Wenwen, Eric Sze’s playful Greenpoint Taiwanese spot — two of Brooklyn’s most popular new restaurants — menu showstoppers include, respectively, furu cacio e pepe mein and so-called B.D.S.M. (brined, deboned, soy milk) fried chicken with a furu-infused baste. At the original Junzi Kitchen location in New Haven, Conn., the Hong Kong-born chef Lucas Sin highlights the ingredient in the furu sesame sauce that comes with his noodle and salad bowls. And at San Francisco’s Michelin-starred Mister Jiu’s, Brandon Jew offers a dish of tendrils, greens and stems with Meyer lemon, sea urchin and fermented tofu. “Furu adds a ton of funk that you can’t get from anything else,” says Eng. — Hetty McKinnon

Kostas Lambridis’s Unexpected Assemblages

The Greek artist and designer Kostas Lambridis incorporates many surprising objects into his dazzling, dizzying sculptures but, above all, he is an assembler of contradictions. Though they resemble furniture, his pieces resist utility: A coffee table’s surface droops down into a funnel; a daybed is composed of terrazzo and metal. Lambridis, 34, is agnostic about his materials, combining plastic with marble, often scavenging both from roadside trash in Athens, where he lives and works. However, he does more than just reimagine salvaged items. “The other half of my work is made from scratch,” he says. “Sometimes I make it look like I found it. And sometimes I’ll treat something I’ve found so it looks like I made it.” His practice, too, is an intentional hybrid of conflicting approaches. “I don’t only want to spend my time bending over the bench for some superdetailed thing. I also want to be dancing in the studio while the concrete dries,” says Lambridis, who, after working for nearly a decade for the Spanish artist Nacho Carbonell, is planning his first American solo exhibition next year at Carpenters Workshop Gallery in New York. — Gillian Brassil

Mini Market: Shearling Footwear in a Variety of Styles