Tate Mok’s World Is Larger Than Life
The emerging designer shares his favorite architects and where he gets his inspiration from.
Tate Mok is a Hong Kong-based designer responsible for some of the most ambitious design projects coming out of the city. Tate regularly engineers large-scale futuristic sculptures in collaboration with his brother, Offgod, and his works have appeared in places like COMPLEX CON, the Adidas in Langham Place, and at Knotify Shanghai. One common motif across his work is the use of soft shapes and lines to create pieces that are “instinctively satisfying,” he says. His work borrows heavily from science fiction, from Blade Runner and Star Wars: in his collaborations with A:SOCIETY and BAPE, for example, alien-like extensions to sunglasses and headphones style wearers in a manner bordering on the post-human. Last month, Tate and his brother established a new independent label together by the name of Offgod:Tate. Speaking to the duo at a garage sale they organized last week, they have plenty of ambitious design projects in store for 2025 (and I can’t wait to see how they’ll take shape!). Here are Tate’s recommendations on THE CHOW:
Moebius comics 💥🗯️🦸♂️
One thing that’s been pretty formational in developing my style is this French comic artist from the 60s-70s called Moebius. He’s basically the first to do very bizarre sci-fi world building — think of cool high-tech cars and flying machines. He really played with scale to open up new possibilities. Moebius has a really iconic drawing style (and you can see that his work influences a lot of comic styles today). The futuristic cars he drew were often the size of buildings; he was always pondering what would happen if humans were on another planet.
Blade Runner (1982) 🗡🏃
Watch Blade Runner, but particularly the 1982 version. The film has these really intense atmospheres, seen in the rain, the color, etc. It’s just amazing. Its also had a huge influence in my work. In the projects that my brother and I do, the goal now is to recreate a similar intensity, curating the spaces in our campaigns down to the atmospheric level. Blade Runner (1982) is often our go-to reference.
Listen to original sound tracks 🔊
Once, my music genre of choice was orchestra, but specifically OSTs (Original Sound Tracks) from films. A few of my favorites…
Blade Runner (1982) has a very crazy OST by Vangelis.
I love the Dune II soundtrack. There’s a song called “Kiss the Ring,” a really epic, going-to-war kind of song.
Another one: “Define Dancing” in Wall-E
A lot of OSTs are just super peaceful melodically. It lets you focus on work and I’d put these songs on to sleep as well.
PDF copies of archived magazines 📖💻
I search up names of old magazines with “PDF” on Google sometimes. Looking at these archived magazines you get a sense of how people dressed back then (most often it’s 90s or 2000s era). If you find stuff you really like, you can use it as a reference for something else. I’m a huge fan right now of Fruits Magazine, which was published in Japan from 1997-2007.
Future Systems Architecture
My favorite architects are Future Systems Architecture. They’re from the UK, and I think they’ve since disbanded. But they did a bunch of really crazy building project that look super out of this world. The design ambition is just so so high. One of the members of the group was my tutor at UCL Bartlett.
They also do really clean drawings (which is how I like to do my own) — very nicely line weighted. My favorite building of theirs is the Ferrari Museum, which sort of looks like the inside of a spaceship.