Design and illusion: Jinil Park, YOY Studio

By Penny Craswell

Last year, Korean designer Jinil Park exhibited his Drawing Series chair and armchair – two chairs that look like drawings. They are so realistic it is difficult to believe the photograph of the chair is not a drawing. The designer created these one-off pieces as an experiment, wanting to see whether he could turn his rough drawings into actual three-dimensional objects that work as a seat: “I created the objects by hand without even a single CAD plan,” says Park. “Choosing the materials, refining and welding them together to make an object was very difficult. But simultaneously it is a difficult and a fun process.”

Also last year, the Canvas series, this time by Japanese design studio YOY, also plays with the idea of turning a drawing into a three dimensional piece of furniture. Hanging Canvas Sofa, which was shown at Salone Satellite during Milan Design Week 2013, is on first glance a print of a drawing of a chair (or sofa) on a stretched canvas. However, these pieces, whose frame is constructed out of wood and aluminium, feature an elastic fabric which allows the user to sit on the canvas – rendering the two-dimensional image of the chair, an actual chair that it is possible to sit in (and is apparently surprisingly comfortable).

While having merit as experiments, it would be easy to dismiss Park and YOY studio’s work as being just two more examples of gimmicks in a global design culture where the media publishes a continuous stream of images of experimental products (most often chairs) that are not truly functional and are never put into production. Often by emerging designers, the purpose of these seems to end with the image on a page or blog, and can launch a designer’s career – or just as easily leave them in exactly the same situation but with a few media clippings.

However, it is possible to find meaning in Park and YOY’s work beyond a simple trick or gimmick. Their work is part of a long tradition, mainly in the art world, of optical illusion.

If you consider Park’s work as a gimmick then what’s to separate it from the work of MC Escher? Both were relatively unknown when they created their work. Both built on the work of others – Escher’s famous impossible objects were created in collaboration with English mathematician Roger Penrose who was inspired by Escher to create the first impossible object, the impossible triangle, while Escher’s “Belvedere” print was inspired by Penrose’s work in turn. Meanwhile, Park’s work is similar, but not as innovative, to the Sketch furniture project by Swedish designers Front, who use 3D motion capture and rapid prototyping to create furniture objects out of drawings in thin air.

And it is possible to read an even deeper meaning into Park’s work. Either consciously or unconsciously, the Drawing Series presents the viewer or user with a dissonance between the old, rapidly disappearing world of drawing by hand and the new world of contemporary design. In bringing back the significance of the hand drawn, Park is privileging a rapidly disappearing art – that of hand-drawn pen and ink.

Likewise YOY studio’s work is significant in that it also recalls a lost world – that of the painting or stretched canvas in a world of video art and 3d animation, while the images of the chairs themselves are not contemporary forms but antique designs.

The purpose of an optical illusion is to surprise and disorient the viewer, making them question their own senses and assumptions. However, the best optical illusion are not just a one trick wonder, offering a quick visual joke. They provide a new way of looking at something – a juxtaposition that in itself makes you think about the world in a new way.

In this way, Park and YOY studio’s collections offer something to the world of design, if not a functional, manufacturable idea, at least a provocative concept that makes us think in new ways about old things. And let’s face it, designers will always be fascinated by chairs.