yinjispace

ARTIST
Daniel De Belder
PHOTOGRAPHY
BIJISPACE边界人
WORDS
Fynn
EDITOR
Gina
Collection

Beyond the city, trees are spared from the axe, left to age in tranquility. Here, time is counted in rings, and all things whisper through their marks. We met Daniel De Belder, who welcomed us into his garden—a tranquil suspension, a vessel steeped in time. This was one stop on our design study journey to Belgium in March. Spring had not yet returned to the woods — what met us first was its scent: damp earth, cedar, a hint of wood smoke. Here, no smell of industry lingers; only fragrances crafted not by man, but by nature itself.

Crossing the tidy courtyard, Daniel pushed open a aged wooden door. Light spilled like water from the high windows, outlining a still and silent world stacked with immense timber and his works. Outside lay an oil-green meadow and a bright yellow facade; inside felt like sinking into another time—where moments are suspended in quiet tenderness, and each piece of wood is held in deep slumber. Some works stand tall in quiet defiance, while others lean as if lost in contemplation. On their surfaces lie the ciphers of time: the stains left by years of water, the shadowy interlace of worm and fungus, or the grain softened by wind and drifting sand. “It feels like a cabinet of monsters,” Daniel remarked, a calm humor flickering in his eyes.

Daniel tends this woodland with care, letting the trees grow freely and taking only those lives ended naturally by storm, gravity, or the passage of time. Running his hand across the bullet mark on a stump, he said, “These timbers are not silent materials, but witness carrying a century of memory.” Most works retain almost the tree’s original form: a gnarled branch transformed into a staircase for his granddaughter to climb; a twisted trunk becoming a bench for rest. Others bear the revelations of fire and blade—the scorched cedar fibers turned translucent, refracting amber ripples when caught by the light. “Burning is not destruction, but revelation,” he said, his gaze lingering on the charred grain.

Having once learned, in his family’s diamond-cutting trade, the art of treasuring precious matter to its utmost, Daniel now carries that reverence into decaying wood. His creations never follow precise blueprints; instead, their forms are allowed to settle and turn within the realm of imagination. Some timbers have slumbered in pond water for decades, while certain works take fifteen years to slowly awaken. “Sometimes I don’t know how to handle a piece of wood,” he said. “So I wait. A year, two years, ten.”

When he finally begins to carve, the blade follows nature’s own guidance—the weight and grain infused into the wood, the fleeting dance of light across its curves. His blade does not ask what the wood “can become,” but rather what it “has always been.”He refuses paint and sealants, choosing instead to let natural oils seep into the fibers or to caress the surface with beeswax, so that touch, scent, and sheen preserve their most elemental vibration. “Varnish creates a barrier,” he said, his hand gliding across the beeswax-nourished grain. “That is not what I want—I seek an openness.”Here, the boundary between function and art dissolves of its own accord: a dining table bears not only food but also the meditation of tree rings; a chandelier ignites with candlelight, yet hangs like a withered branch suspended in air. None of the works exist merely to be looked at—they wait to be touched, just as time itself never strives for perfection, but only for the truth of being.

As we move through this space, following Daniel’s gaze, we come to see the world anew: cracks become lines of tension, decay turns into a language of composition, and wormholes are no longer flaws but indispensable footnotes in the wood’s story. As we departed, a thought echoed within us—perhaps Daniel does not carve, so much as he gently unveils a corner of the epic that nature has already quietly composed.

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