Valienska Magfira, Hyun-Gi Kim

The Chair That Bleeds

The Red Series 001 Breath Chair by Hyun-Gi Kim

We consider chairs to be one of those everyday inanimate furnitures that fills the room. And like many inanimate objects, they’re often taken for granted because chairs are always being made. But chairs, however boring they may be, can have a sentimental value to them. We personify chairs sometimes because it does support us: our weight, our muscles, and our overall comfort. Now how would we view chairs if it was personified even further? For example if chairs were to have their own blood circulation?

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Red Series 001, Breathe by Hyun-Gi Kim photographed by Sumin Shin - Sumin Shin, Hyun-Gi Kim

With hundreds of tubes and fake blood in blood bags, Hyun-Gi Kim from Hongik University of Seoul creates his chair with two seats at opposite ends connected by the tubes. So if one were to sit at one end, the blood would flow through the tubes and fill the bloodbags at the other end. It represents a similar function to our own blood circulation when pressure is applied but it's not to say that the chair is now alive with a conscience.

However the transparency of the blood circulation in the chair exemplifies the philosophy of energy, which can be said to be in everything and everywhere. As such, by personifying a chair by giving it a blood circulation shows us that like living entities, they are affected by energy just as they can create it too. That’s definitely something to be mindful of when treating our possessions.

Hyun-Gi Kim's Red Series 001, Breathe was heard through: Dezeen

This work has been started from my visual experience. Through that experience, the furniture has been made.
Blood comes in many ways to us. As like hatred, terror, new birth of gestation of life.
I want to introduce the vitality of the blood to the furniture which is commonly associated with life and death, unlike conventional and functional chair from those veins.
And, ‘the object of furniture is a living things’ is main idea of this created work.
The audience can experience the bringing life into the next chair by sitting in this chair.
The connecting hundreds or thousands of hoses make a large amount of liquid rushed into the adjoining chair, and the chair rises with the sounds of liquid.
That makes us to remind the muscles and breathing of heart, and giving audience to experience visual and auditory stimulation.
When audience sit down, they can experience the blood circulate constantly.
If they perform ‘sit’, it will survive this chair by fundamental functions of the furniture.
This furniture seems like alive.