MINJAE KIM

“A chair can assume a personality,” says Minjae Kim, standing on a carpet of sawdust, a chain saw at his feet. Bits of wood fleck his dark button-down shirt, shorts and clogs, and there are stray shavings in his bun of black hair. 

“You can connect with its character,” continues the Korean-born designer, explaining that for him, anthropomorphizing furniture is a process of “animating objects” and a response to an absence of personality in 20th-century design. “Modernism’s intention was to remove those characteristics in order to function anywhere, but that’s very aggressive. It’s time to mend that connection again.”

When we talk, Kim is in the midst of a four-week stay at Numeroventi, an artist residence and design gallery in a 16th-century palazzo in Florence.¹ His temporary studio there is filled with works in progress—the one-of-a-kind fiberglass lamps and offbeat wooden seating that he is lauded for. He points to the pencil marks on three half-finished chairs in chestnut wood to show what he’ll carve out next; the scrapes and burns on his right hand are proof of his direct, handcrafted process. “I could never have sketched these chairs,” he says. “You get more ideas working directly with your hands.”

Kim moved to the US for college and took furniture-making electives while studying for his master’s in architecture at Columbia University.² He had expected that the pieces he made there would be part of his future buildings—“but no one was going to give an architecture project to a young designer, and the furniture scale was a faster way to establish my voice.” He still dreams of grand building projects, but with these emotive handcrafted pieces he’s also crossing over into the role of artist, bolstered by his collaborations with trailblazing galleries of collectible design—Etage Projects in Copenhagen, Nina Johnson in Miami, Matter in New York and Marta in Los Angeles, in addition to Numeroventi.³

“You get more ideas working directly with your hands.”

“It feels weird to say I’m in design because what I do is so different,” Kim says, leaning on a ladder where a smock hangs ready for woodworking. “Design comes with promises of repeatability, but I don’t work like that. I treat everything I touch as a one-off.” Clients often try to order a piece they’ve seen previously, but as all of his pieces are made by hand and in the moment, they can’t be replicated.

 At Numeroventi, he’s carved a pair of battling bulls from stumps of wood in response to the war in the news.⁴ The half-finished asymmetrical chairs are spectators to this expression of violence. “Just making cute, comfortable chairs didn’t seem right,” Kim says, touching the twisted hollows of their seats.

Kim suggests that he’s “hard to pin down.” “But that’s who I am: a foreigner in America; an American in Korea.⁵ I’m working as an artist, but my market is in design.” Instead, he is simply following an example set by his mother, a painter. “Art was always the most important part of day-to-day life,” Kim says, picking up a saw to get back to his work. “And that’s become my mantra too.”