When looking for a chair, of course what you want is for something that you can sit on comfortably. Depending also on your budget or on your space, you probably don’t really care much about the design of it as long as it is able to perform its main function which is that you can sit on it. But there are some chairs that are not just functional. In fact, sitting on it may not be the only purpose of it but it becomes a piece of art, or in this case, even performance art.
Designer: Ahn Kihyun
The Halfway Serious chair will probably not make you comfortable and will even make you anxious if you’re that kind of person. But what it will definitely do is make the “mundane” act of sitting more interesting and more challenging. Aside from the actual seat, it uses a gimbal structure so you have to balance sitting on the chair so that the eggs placed on either end will not drop and become a yolky mess. Of course you don’t need to really put actual raw eggs but that defeats the purpose of the chair, which is to balance it out.
Designer Ahn Kihyun is known for his experimental designs for alternative furniture or “anti-furniture”. He believes that by adding elements to his pieces that give different experiences to the users, the act of using it can actually become a sort of performance art. For this particular piece, he made the egg container at either end of the gimbal look like an island. But with the addition of the chair in the middle, which looks like an ordinary bench on its own, you are able to tell a different story.
It would be interesting to sit on something like this although as a person with a balance problem, the eggs will probably not be long for this world. As its name suggests, Halfway Serious will not be an actual chair that you can sit on every day but something that belongs in a museum or a space meant to invite people to try it out and see if you can keep the eggs from cracking on the floor.
