[chair]

CHAIR

2019

Vintage French Chair, Canvas

Antwerp, Belgium

Before the chair became a chair, it was merely timber, metal, labour, and time.

Before the word was spoken.

Before language settled upon its form.

Before function became identity.

It existed without significance.

Yet even in its absence, recognition remains.

Remove its legs.

Separate its joints.

Dissect its body.

Scatter its components across a surface.

Still the mind insists upon calling it a chair.

Chair represents the culmination of Tae's Sign and Significant series. Throughout the preceding works, familiar objects were displaced from their original functions in order to examine the fragile relationship between form and meaning. Roofs ceased to shelter. Blinds ceased to divide. Architecture became sculpture. Utility became symbol.

With Chair, the investigation reaches its most distilled form.

A vintage French chair was dismantled entirely. Every component was separated from the whole and carefully arranged upon a black canvas. The object ceased to function. Its body collapsed into fragments. The chair could no longer perform the task for which it had been created.

Yet recognition survived.

The eye continued to reconstruct the object despite its physical disintegration.

The work occupies an uncertain territory between sculpture, painting, archaeology, and anatomy. Each fragment resembles a bone extracted from a larger body and catalogued against a monochromatic ground. The canvas becomes less a support than a site of examination.

The work asks where meaning resides.

Within material.

Within function.

Within form.

Within memory.

Or within language itself.

Chair offers no definitive answer.

Instead, it stands at the precise moment where meaning survives the disappearance of utility.

The chair is gone.

Yet the chair remains.

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