Korea-born, Netherlands-based modern artist Hansol Kim uses collected items of clothing and material as a medium to explore societal, political and cultural issues. The modern art exhibition ‘Wearing Chairs While Sitting on Pants’ questions why art furniture often feels less intimate than clothing and examines the defining elements of both furniture and clothes.

'Wearing Chair While Sitting On Pants' - Modern Art by Hansol Kim

Moreover, in this modern art Kim questions what leads consumers to buy each item, whether they protect our body and/or personal belongings, and draws parallels between the functions of features such as pockets and drawers. Kim asserts that both furniture design and clothing mediate the body in its environment via varying levels of intimacy and mobility.

“I question the constraints of these assumptions by exploring the seam between the categories of furniture and clothing, with the intention of more deliberately activating a new object category in that between-space,”
says Kim.

Each modern art chair is composed of a patchwork of various materials such as leather, plastic, a moto suit, faux fur, Velcro, a car console, a massage chair, and a scooter saddle.

Fuelled both by Kim’s personal passion for clothing, and eagerness to make furniture-like clothing, the series aims to activate the participant’s imagination.

“Are new words, functions or aesthetic values generated? And more expansively, how might the blurring or recasting of this boundary suggest the productive rethinking of other object categories?”
ponders Kim.