The Korean designer Kwon Jae Min designs and crafts a beautiful range of furniture under the title "Grow Up". So far, he has developed a “vocabulary” of tables, chairs, benches, lamps, coat racks and bowls; often in combination. For example a table with a lamp or a coat rack protruding out of its surface.
While the structures are compound, made from pieces of wood that masterfully have been joined together, with smooth transitions between all elements, he works with the grain of the wood so that the structural lines are echoed in the textural grain. We may consider this to be based on the tradition of organic design (as defined by the architect Frank Lloyd Wright), where form and function are unified and shapes, colors and patterns are based on nature itself. Kwon Jae Min's work however hints at older craft traditions, where furniture and utility objects were made by finding pieces of wood that naturally had grown into a shape containing as much as possible of the finished object and thereby minimizing effort and optimizing strength and beauty.
Kwon Jae Min has both a Bachelor (2004) and Masters (2009) degree in Fine Art from the University of Hongik in Seoul. Based in Seongnam, a major city in the Seoul Capital Area in South Korea, he has exhibited extensively in his home country but his work can also be found in the Korea Cultural Centre in London and Design/Miami-Basel in Switzerland.
Jan. 13, 2014
Parsons
Strate College
Beckmans College of Design
Central Saint Martins
LOFT 42
Red Dot design award
