About This Artwork
Tokujin Yoshioka
Japanese, born 1967
Honey-Pop Armchair2001
Honeycomb-paper construction
79.4 x 81.3 x 81.3 cm (31 x 32 x 32 in.) (unfolded)
Restricted gift of the Architecture & Design Society, 2007.111
Tokujin Yoshioka's unfettered creativity was greatly nurtured by fashion designer Issey Miyake, who hired the young designer in 1988. His lack of specific fashion training left him free to experiment with unexpected materials and investigate how materials perform under new circumstances. The designer's Honey-Pop Armchair defies the notion of furniture as merely functional. Made from layers of glassine, a traditional type of paper used for lanterns, bonded together with glue, Honey-Pop Armchair is constructed by opening the layers of paper like a Christmas decoration to create a three-dimensional object. The final form is made when the designer sits on the opened paper, his imprint creating the seat. The honeycomb composition gives the design its strength. Both sculptural and ethereal, the chair plays upon the intangible idea of an object and the materiality of its being. Without an underlying frames, the chair is like an oversize, intricate work of origami.
The name Honey-Pop refers not only to its appearance as a giant honeycomb but also to the legacy of Pop Art, which championed commonplace yet unorthodox materials. The Honey-Pop Armchair debuted at the 2002 Milan International Furniture Fair. In assembly-line fashion, Yoshioka laid out a thick roll of the layered paper, cutting out seat shapes, which he opened up like a book to create the chair and reveal its seemingly insubstantial honeycomb structure. To show its tensile strength, Yoshioka sat on the chair, demonstrating how the weight of his body actually fixed the paper folds into place.