2025
product design
At the center of the installation sits an old oak chair, weight-bearing, time-bearing. Its surface is marked not by conventional paint, but by a slow-burning method: lines etched by a tattoo artist, translating skin practice onto wood. The chair holds memory differently now. Each burn is irreversible, like a decision that refuses to be undone.
The imagery is intimate, almost anatomical—veins, roots, gestures that resemble hands learning each other. The chair is no longer an object of rest, but a witness to repetition and renewal. It suggests duration: something that has held bodies, and will continue to do so, without asking who or why.
Suspended above, a single light hovers—not fixed, but held in tension. Stabilized by magnetic force, it resists both falling and settling. The light trembles slightly, responding to invisible fields, to the presence of bodies moving nearby. It behaves less like illumination and more like a participant.
The true participant (who sitting on the chair) is invited into this condition of beginning—where familiarity is deliberately erased. The chair, though old, becomes a site of first contact. To sit is to enter a practice: to touch the past without inheriting it.
The painted tree roots extend beneath the transparent acrylic coat. It speaks to entanglement, to a form of connection that is both ancient and adaptive. While the chair holds vertical memory, the roots suggest horizontal persistence—growth through contact, through resistance, through time.
The magnetic light above becomes a quiet counterpoint: a system of forces that stabilizes without fixing. It implies that balance is not stillness, but continuous negotiation.
“No excuse” appears not as a command, but as a condition. There is no justification for remaining the same. Each day insists on difference, even within the same bodies, the same objects, the same room—but a new experience.
This installation does not ask the participant to understand, but to rehearse—to sit, to notice, to experience the subtle disorientation of repetition without sameness.
To begin again, daily,no excuse.
( credits )
Design — Gary Chen, Lidiia Velbovets
Engineering — Harsh Kuma