Flatpack Chair by Eric Ku is Self-Explanatory

Eric Ku

We do love flatpack, (clever designs that use little material and are cheap to ship) and we decry excess packaging, so what could be better than a flatpack that tells you what it is. That is what Eric Ku, a recent grad from the School of Visual Arts in New York has designed.

Eric writes:

An inspiration from the American contemporary artist Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Chair. Instead of giving new definition, I redefined the concept of a chair by using alphabet. One is able to construct a chair by assembling the redesigned alphabets.

Kosuth famously put a chair, a photo and a dictionary definition together in 1965, titled "One and Three Chairs", and each installation was really a set of instructions: find a chair, photograph it, and blow up a definition. He said in 1970:

"I used common, functional objects - such as a chair - and to the left of the object would be a full-scale photograph of it and to the right of the object would be a photostat of a definition of the object from the dictionary. Everything you saw when you looked at the object had to be the same that you saw in the photograph, so each time the work was exhibited the new installation necessitated a new photograph. I liked that the work itself was something other than simply what you saw. By changing the location, the object, the photograph and still having it remain the same work was very interesting. It meant you could have an art work which was that idea of an art work, and its formal components weren't important."

-Wikipedia

More at Eric Ku, via Swiss Miss

Other flatpack chairs we have admired:

dietiker photo
Flatpack Chair from Dietiker Switzerland