Hot Hand: Minjae Kim
The Korean-born furniture designer transcends sticky definitional debates about art and design to create some of the most memorable furniture you’ve ever seen.
By Glenn Adamson
The New Museum’s extension, which opened in March, is quite literally a breath of fresh air. The institution’s two-decade-old building, by the Japanese firm SANAA, was always beguiling from the street—it still looks like a stack of presents, ready to be opened. But until now it was fatally cramped inside, each floor besieged by its own circulation space. The new addition fits onto this existing structure like a giant prosthetic. The principal architect, OMA’s Shohei Shigematsu, has compared it to the launchpad armature for an orbital rocket. In addition to a generously proportioned atrium and stairway, which provide access to each gallery floor, the building now has much-needed amenities including a larger gift shop and that must-have for any contemporary museum: a nice restaurant. It’s called Oberon, and its doors open this month.
That’s where Minjae Kim comes in. Born in Seoul in 1989 and now working out of a studio in East Williamsburg, Kim is one of the most exciting furniture makers in the country. An experimentalist at heart, his creations are, like all the best contemporary art and design, a little bit strange and instantly memorable. Inside Oberon, Kim’s furniture lends a creative vibe in keeping with the venue: executive chef Julia Sherman, and her chef de cuisine, Ali Ghrisky, are both artists trained at the Rhode Island School of Design.
First trained as an architect at Columbia University, Kim later worked in the interior design office of Giancarlo Valle. This background gave him a keen understanding of Shigematsu’s overall scheme for Oberon. Kim’s furnishings perfectly complement the curvaceous space, which is lined with cork, an ecological choice that also dampens sound. For Oberon’s tables—some are square, while others float in the zone between square and round—he paired the material with natural and stained ash. Their peculiar shape is inspired by his mother, the abstract painter MyoungAe Lee, who constructs exquisitely irregular works from canvas, plaster, cloth, and pigment. Lee still lives in South Korea, but that hasn’t stopped them from collaborating, including on a mother-and-son show at the New York City gallery Matter in 2022. He has attributed much of his sensibility to her: “I almost can’t avoid making work that doesn’t relate to hers.”
Kim’s approach to the Oberon commission also reflects the influence of his father, a priest and practitioner of Won Buddhism—a reformist tradition originating in Korea that focuses on practical mindfulness. In general, Kim’s work reflects this worldview, with its quiet, understated integrity. Perhaps it’s fitting that he started his career during the Covid pandemic, in a state of enforced monkish solitude: With Giancarlo Valle projects on hold, he began making fiberglass works at home, a material he could easily manipulate in the confines of his apartment. The time-killing side project soon achieved escape velocity: Kim left Valle’s office in 2021, concurrent with his breakout solo show at the Los Angeles gallery Marta, one of America’s most important incubators of art and design talent. Among other striking pieces, the show featured an uncanny figural armchair inspired by one owned by Sigmund Freud and a large desk honoring the paper cutouts of Henri Matisse, as well as one of his mom’s paintings.
Last year, Kim returned to Marta with Phantom-22, an exhibition about the ghosts of Los Angeles—famously, “the city that plays itself.” The show’s title was an allusion to P-22, the elusive mountain lion that prowled Griffith Park and the Hollywood Hills between 2012 and 2022, and it featured furniture inspired by Buster Keaton’s wonderful two-reeler from 1920, One Week, in which the silent comedian misassembles the parts of a prefabricated house into something straight out of a Cubist painting. The work in Kim’s show was diverse—seating forms, tables, room dividers, lighting, cabinets, sculpted pumas—but it all had the same contrapuntal, bricolaged aesthetic.
The Chair Test
Last month, I had the chance to share a stage with Kim, along with Salon 94’s Jackie Greenberg, in a panel discussion at the New Art Dealers Alliance—which, like other art fairs, has started to include more design in its program. Unsurprisingly, we were asked to discuss the relationship between art and design, a topic that’s been beaten to death but always seems to resurface.
For his part, Kim was commendably clear: He doesn’t really care how you define his work as long as you find it compelling. This attitude is common among his generational peers, who tend to regard classifications of all kinds as more or less irrelevant. Institutions have not necessarily adapted to this way of thinking. Salon 94 and Marta are among the few galleries that effectively traverse the realms of art and design, and most museums remain balkanized territory. Even so, you can see a consensus forming that these categories are edifices fading in the rearview mirror of history. At best, they’re only helpful for navigation.
And yet what distinguishes Kim as a cross-disciplinary artist—as well as others in his cohort, like Misha Kahn, Jessi Reaves, and Katie Stout—is not just his generative imagination but also his impressive formal control and conceptual rigor. I once heard the Italian architect Mario Bellini say that designing a chair is harder than designing a whole building. His proof? It’s easy to name an architect who has designed many great buildings, but hard to name anyone who’s made more than a single great chair. Kim has at least one to his name already—more precisely, a whole family of related seating forms, “all developed from a ‘blank chair,’ which could be ordered in multiples and individually carved to different results,” as he told me. They share the same heavy, square legs, deeply carved seats, and slight, bipartite backs that reach upward toward the ceiling—a gesture occasionally emphasized with rabbit-ear curves or fists held aloft, as if in triumph. The chairs might be a little crazy, but they certainly work.
The same can be said for all of Kim’s furniture. You never know what he’s going to make next—as with other rare talents, his creative vocabulary expands as he goes along, rather than getting stuck inside it—but when it’s finished, it all makes perfect sense. Surface magazine once asked him to describe “the problem that his work solves,” a question you’d only ask a designer, not an artist. His response was fascinating, if a little puzzling: “Sometimes my work allows one to place a piece of furniture where they don’t really want a piece of furniture there.” My guess is that he wasn’t being literal when he said this; he wasn’t thinking only about activating a particular part of a room. As always, he was thinking poetically. Where can furniture go that it hasn’t been before and where it might never be expected? Kim is one of the artists who can tell us.