In this episode, we speak with New York-based designer Minjae Kim about treating his materials as collaborators, using his work as a means of familial connection, and exploring the space between design and discovery. 

Podcast produced by Ryan Leahey
Original theme music by Kasper Bjørke
Photographs by Clement Pascal

Christopher Schreck:
So I know you and Landon have been friends for a while, but I haven’t actually heard the story of how you two met. That might be a fun place to start.

Minjae Kim:
I guess this is when I was working back at Studio Giancarlo Valle on Canal Street. I think it was during pandemic. We just kept hearing about Landon moving into the unit next door. There was a fire escape that I would go out to every once in a while, and I would just kind of keep bumping into Landon and we would start chatting. He would have me over sometimes to show me the new stuff that he had in the studio, like plants or furniture or new work.

Landon Metz:
Yeah. I mean, when I moved to the studio, there’s a door that faces the corner alley, this little street behind Canal. I’d just leave it open for extra light, though it's also a very charming NYC downtown view, and you were always out on the fire escape chilling. We started hanging out on the fire escape. I was like, “This is amazing, having a studio on Canal Street! You just walk out your door and make friends, and it's the best.” I didn't realize that that was actually going to be kind of an anomaly.

MK:
Yeah. I mean, it was just like a nice escape for me too, right? I think I was just going out there whenever I wanted to skip the office for a bit, and that's when I was kind of starting to think about leaving the office and starting my own practice, so it was actually really nice to talk to Landon and just kind of get a glimpse. So I think our conversations kind of progressed towards that, and then eventually I wasn't there anymore.

LM:
Yeah, it was a transitional moment for you. But you had a lot of good energy, I could feel it. I felt it happening. 

MK:
Thank you.

LM:
How long were you working with Giancarlo? What was it like deciding to transition out of that space and having a job and doing your own thing?

MK:
I was there for a total of three years, maybe a little less. Basically, I was on a student visa at the time. I was under this thing called “optional practical training,” which allows you to work within the field of your study for up to three years, depending on your degree. So I worked pretty much that entire time with him, and it was just really great. I did architecture in grad school, and then I wasn't sure what I was going to do after. Working with Giancarlo was kind of the perfect balance of working with architecture, but also across all scales and down to every detail. I’d never had the chance to work in that detail, so that was really great. Then the transition out happened pretty smoothly, because there was that election [in 2016], and that gave me a lot of thoughts about whether I wanted to stay here as an immigrant or not. That’s kind of how the initial conversation of leaving the office happened, because I was basically telling him that if Trump was reelected, it was pretty likely that I would not stay in the US, and he agreed. Then, the next few months, that discussion turned into, “Actually, Giancarlo, my practice’s growing. I think I have a chance to get my own artist visa, and I'm just going to run with that.” It’s always tricky when immigration is involved in getting or leaving job, but in this case, I think it made it a little bit easier, because that was a bigger force, so there was no room for drama in terms of different things that we wanted from each other after the three years of working together.

CS:
Giancarlo practiced architecture for about a decade before he went into furniture design. Was he providing you insights, whether explicitly or by example, that wound up informing the practice that you established?

MK:
In the sense that he never got licensed. That definitely did inform me, because you know, you come out of school, and they try to show you a pretty straight trajectory of how you become an architect or how you lay out your practice as an architect after graduation. Just seeing him as an example of still having a very sophisticated practice without being licensed or focusing on academia, I think it opened a lot of different doors for me.

LM:
More motivated by poetry and intuition.

MK:
Yeah, for sure.

CS:
So just to get a sense of it, what was your role at the studio while you were there? What kind of projects were you taking on?

MK:
I was lead designer. There were a lot of projects that I worked on throughout my time there, but I was usually involved if any walls were coming down or if we were redefining any space—that was the scale that I would get involved in. If we were doing more mill work or surface changes, I didn't work on that as much. And then, I didn't get do it as much, but I also worked on a lot of furniture. Sometimes I would do fabrication, sometimes I'd be on the roof of our building and making some custom pieces, which was always fun. I remember that set up. It was cool.

LM:
You guys had all these electric cords going through the windows up the front of the building onto the roof.

MK:
Yeah, we had to get an extension cord and then throw it out the window and then the other person would have to catch it from the roof.

LM:
At what point did you transition from working more conceptually and building plans to work more materially and hands on?

MK:
I think I was always drawn to the material practice, and building or working with my hands. I feel like that was always there. Even in undergrad, when I was doing architecture in undergrad while also painting at the time, there was always that tactility and really deep interest in material, but they were always kind of like side projects. I’d try to have that be part of my projects and whatnot, but at the end of the day, in school, you're working with theoretical projects or hypothetical projects, so it's really hard to convey or work with real material. Maybe you can make a building sample, or you’d make a scale model and try to convey that in the scale model, but it would never be enough. It's never one-to-one scale. So towards the end of my undergrad, there was a furniture studio where, instead of doing a building, we developed two prototypes and then one final piece of actual furniture. That was kind of first time coming up with an idea and then building it in real life, at a one-to-one scale with the intended material. Ever since then, I kept doing that on the side, whether it was a little furniture chair or lamp or whatever. I kept doing this project where I would just build it one-to-one, not hypothetical. That gave me a lot of satisfaction, so that continued and then eventually scaled up to a point where I could just have that be my practice.

CS:
Yeah. I remember at one point, there was a line on your website that said, “Whenever construction work is frustrating, I make furniture.” But it seems like working in that mode, working in a different way, gave you access not just to different material options and different scales, but also to a different pace.

MK:
Yes. I'm not a that patient of a person, at least when it comes to creative projects. I would just like a race when I have a picture. I get really irrational a little bit, where I’m just like, “Oh fuck it, I don't care about that detail,” or whatever. I just try to get there, which sometimes ends up with bad projects. But I had that tendency in me, and working on these projects where they would take years, I’d get so frustrated. Even at school, working on a project that would take three months to present, I would be like, “Man…” So in order to let that out, that's why I had side projects, and that's why I like wrote about that on my website, which is in a desperate need for an update.

LM:
Your practice now seems to be, at this point, very materially driven. I'm wondering how long it takes you to realize each piece. Do you work from sketches? Do you start with a piece of wood or a sheet of fiberglass and start playing around until it shows you what it wants, or do you have very precise plans in place beforehand?

MK:
It’s usually all of the above. I would say it's definitely not that precise. If anything, I try to take all the precise parts of the design or assembly outside out of my studio. My studio is not set up as a conventional woodworking or fabrication shop; it’s really just a 400-square-foot room with a small outdoor area where we can do all the carving and sanding. So, for example, if I'm working on a chair, I could make the chair in less than a day, because I now work with different woodworkers who do the assembly for me. I get these identical blocks delivered to my studio per my drawing, and then they deliver me very precise pieces of wood that will have screws and dominoes or biscuits in specific locations so that I know where I can carve them and where I can't. So I'm aware of the where the precision needs to happen, but I'm not really dealing with it too much if possible. I can just focus on the messy part, because that's the part that I can't really explain to other people. That's the part that I feel like I need the most control over. If it's precision that I need, I can usually outsource that and have much more skilled or talented people work on that.

CS:
In any creative pursuit, it seems like the element of surprise is vital to sustaining and progressing in one's practice—and in looking at your work, I'm especially interested in how new ideas and unforeseen results might be tied directly to the materials that you've chosen to work with. So, for example, if we divide your work into wood work and fiberglass work, I'd be curious to know what each material offers you as a designer, and how each one lends itself to distinct ideas or particular kinds of projects.

MK:
I guess arriving at that kind of palette was just what was available to me, in a sense. I think that was the biggest thing, and now I'm still kind of riding that wave. I mean, wood, I was familiar with it from school; it's pretty easy to work with and kind of universal. Fiberglass, I started working with it because I had started one chair in grad school in fiberglass. I had a really difficult time, but I liked the effect of it. Mostly, I like it because I can create a really sturdy form with almost no setting, because it comes in fabric. As long as I have some kind of scaffolding or a surface for it to rest on, I can kind of capture that form. Another cool thing is that I could do it at home or on the rooftop, as opposed to wood. If I had to work with a metal to achieve the same form and thickness, it would have been impossible with the tools I had available. So the same thing continued when I had a basement studio in Ridgewood. It just kind of kept developing. I think those two materials behave so differently— like, wood is very solid and it’s a mess to work with, and then fiberglass being this plane, it’s very thin but rigid. Between those two materialities, you can do a lot. So I think that's what kept me focused on those materials. Then, for the show I have right now with Matter, it was my first time using metal, because now, through the infrastructure that became available through working with them, I felt like I could use other materials.

LM:
How did that show at Matter come about? You did a two-person show with your mother, right? 

MK:
Yeah. I think it was it was after I did my first show at Marta. I was back in New York, and Jamie [Gray] from Matter had reached out to do a studio visit. This is when crazy things like people reaching out to me was starting to happen. I was pretty familiar with the identity of their program, because they've been in the same location on Broome Street forever, and like a decade ago, when I had just finished undergrad and was starting to work in furniture, I was obsessively consuming all the history of furniture and I stumbled into the store on a visit to New York to see a friend. I remember going to his store, and Patrick Parrish, and those were the places that really shocked me.

LM:
What was it about these places that shocked you, Minjae?

MK:
I don't know, it was just so unexpected. I remember I first saw, like, Faye Toogood’s work there, and I had never seen a furniture store like that. I think that's the first time I saw, “Oh, wow. This is, like, a thing. This is something that people do and appreciate.” Before that, in school, I'd only seen very historic things, like Bauhaus—very academic modernist furniture.

So I’d always use [Matter’s] website and their inventory as a reference, and then when Jamie reached out to me, I was really ecstatic. Around the same time, I had some paintings that my mom had sent me, just to have around. Jamie saw one of my mom's paintings, which is actually in the show right now, and we just started talking about it. At first, he thought it was my own my painting. There was no line between the furniture that I was making and her work that was in the space. So we just kind of start talking about the idea of having a show with the work from us, too.

CS:
I'd be curious to hear which painting it was that made Jamie think that, because it does seem like your mom works in a few different modes: there's the abstract compositions on asymmetrical canvases, but there are also pieces like the mountain painting, where she's dealing with conventional framing and flirting with depiction. Can you describe which painting Jamie thought was yours?

MK:
Yeah, it’s a black painting that kind of looks like a big fat sock that's hanging on the curtains. It's one of the earlier shaped-canvas works that she made with inked paper. It just has a great texture, great composition. It’s one of my favorite works that she made when I was in junior high, and when I had initially proposed to my mom about sending some more and maybe doing something in New York, I was like, “That painting. You have to send me that painting.”

LM:
I was going to say, I think there’s something about your language that really resonates with me. There’s this kind of raw humanity to it. There’s an intimacy to it, there's a sensitivity to it. I wonder if that kind of interpretation of art being a form of intimacy came from growing up with a parent who was a practicing painter? I'm sure subconsciously her aesthetic and her language did inform you to some degree, but is any of that intentional or anything that you're conscious of or aware of?

MK:
To answer the latter question, I think definitely. I mean, it must have been. Intimacy is something that I try to build into my work for sure, and it's not even like something that I try to plan out. I think it just kind of comes out, because I want to make work that's not intimidating. I mean, I think there is a layer that I thought about a lot when I was starting to do architecture, or when I was trying to really get into painting in undergrad, and it was because I was trying to unravel in my head why I'm so drawn into a specific type of materiality. It was always that more messy, open-grained or textured type of surface, which my mom uses a lot. I was like, “Why am I so into this?” I kind of came to the conclusion that it is because in that kind of open messiness, I could feel more connection to it, because it's unresolved and it registers time better than a perfect material. So maybe there's some connection there, I don't know.

LM:
What about it being unresolved makes you feel like you have the capacity to connect with it more?

MK:
I think because it just tells its story better. It shows its process better, so you can almost see or try to capture the intention there, or how it was done. When I see work that I like, I always like to imagine, “How did they do it?” I see that person doing it, or I see myself reading into that scenario, if that makes sense.

LM:
Yeah, it's like the original human hand print on a cave, right? It's like, this person was alive and they did this thing, and there's like a kind of synthesis that happens, where you’re bridging a divide.

MK:
Right, exactly. I think with a lot of industrial process, or if certain processes become really advanced or developed, it kind of surpasses a human ability of precision or whatever, and it becomes impossible to perceive the process of how it was done. So that's kind of like the opposite. For example, I always thought the iPhone was the opposite: it's a perfect product or whatever, and its design and the way it's built is impenetrable. You cannot conceive how it's made. So I feel like you can't build a relationship with it until it gets cracked or scratched, or you buy a case or whatever, you know? You add these stupid things and then it becomes yours, right? Those are the little tactile moments that you can grab onto, and I'm always like, “How do I have more of that in my work?” My mom's work always had a lot, even before she went abstract—like when she was just doing representational painting, the way she used oil paint was so thick, you know what I mean? It's like globbed on.

CS:
It's interesting, because it seems like the Matter show gave you the opportunity to explore the dialogue between your work and hers more deeply, or maybe more openly, than you had in the past, but you’ve actually been pairing your work with hers for a while now. I know you included it in the 2021 show at Marta, and you've often added her paintings to the background scenery for photo shoots, so it does seem like you'd already drawn a connection—or maybe were interested in suggesting a connection—between the two bodies of work even before this show. But it seems much more blatant here, where you're actually producing certain pieces in direct response to the work. I think an obvious example of that would be the shaped canvas chair, where you recreated one of her pieces and used it as a chair back. It might be interesting to hear about how producing this show gave you an opportunity to kind of branch out and explore some new territory, whether in terms of color, in terms of material, or whatever else.

MK:
You know, when Jamie and I start talking about the show together with my mom, and when I started talking about it with my mom, I was very excited for many different reasons. The personal reason was because I can have her in my world, just to expand the world that she's already in or, in a way, bring her to the audience that she always deserved, because I always admired her work but felt like more people should see it. That's why I started having her work in my environment. You know, it's like not that cheap to ship work or paintings just for no reason, but we did it because when I started making my own work, I thought I should have her a work around to me—and then, of course, once I had them around, I was like, “Wow, they just work so well together with the world that I'm interested in creating. Maybe we should really show them together.” So that's kind of how that developed. And then from just my point of view, when I'm making work in my studio or what material I use, I thought that working off her aesthetic or visual language, or just having my work be in this particular context, will allow me to expand more, because it’s a specific context that will allow me to not focus so much on design and practicality. I guess when I first showed work at Marta, I still felt like it had to be “design objects,” and I’ve been trying to slowly break out of that a little bit, so it made so much sense to directly respond to her work and try to see what comes out of it. It felt like I was given an excuse to try to use more color and adopt a process that's more like painting than furniture-making. That's how those shaped fiberglass chairs were done: I constructed the form, but a lot of it was done like a collage work, where I kept adding or subtracting a plane or a surface, change the silhouettes over and over, and then paint, repaint it, scratch out. That was something I never did in my other furniture work. I'm sure if I just did it, it would have been cool, too, but this felt like a good context to do it.

CS:
Yeah, and I feel like that work, along with some of the other pieces in the show, demonstrated some real some real growth in your practice, even since the show last year at Marta. It does seem like you've progressed in terms of both design and production, and I feel like one piece that really speaks to that is the armoire, which you've described as being maybe the most ambitious piece that you've made to date. Can you talk about your process there, and what made that work stand out?

MK:
Yeah. It was a very intense thing to build, mostly because of the size. It's similar to the metal chairs, or just using metal in general, because there's a little aluminum part that goes into the armoire—it's the second layer of the doors—which was something I feel like I couldn't have touched before. This was definitely the peice where I was like, “How much can I take advantage of the connections or infrastructure that I have now, which I can build into the work?” I'd been working with ZAK+FOX, using some of their fabric for some upholstered chairs, I had worked with Atelier Jouffre on some upholstery pieces, and at some point, those connections and little conversations we've had previously about working together on something all clicked into place when I started designing this armoire. I knew that I wanted to make a big closet armoire cabinet piece, but didn't really know what it was. Then I kind of thought about it, and was like, “Oh, I can I could probably use this fabric from ZAK+FOX! That would be amazing. How do I do it?” So I spoke to Zak [Profera], and he told me that I should upholster it with Atelier Jouffre, and I was like, “I’ve worked with them before, they're amazing.” So I went to them and talked about this project, and then they advised me to work on a specific type of assembly. That’s how the whole show came together. Then, for the inside of the cabinet, I just slapped together a few different ideas I had before, and then the metal part, the Matter team delivered. So all of all of these pieces just showed up at my door, and I had to put it together with my assistants—and this is, like, eight feet tall. I didn't even think about it, because prior to assembling, I was like, “Well, you know, plywood is eight feet long. We’ll just make an eight-foot-tall armoire.” And we put it together, and it was huge. So big, it was kind of scary. Until the fabrics went up, I was like, “I've made a terrible mistake. This is way too big. This is insane.” There was a point where we put the doors on, and three of us were tilting it up to stand it up. I was pushing it up, and the moment it went over 60-70 degrees and started to stand up, it lifted me up off the ground, and I was just, like, hanging off the top edge of the armoire, just kind of balanced. It was really scary, but also such a cool moment, because it had overcome me. I was like, “Wow, this is insane.” It was just a lot to get it out there. But yeah, it was it was extremely satisfying and exciting. Definitely the biggest takeaway was just being able to work with all these other people, which I could never have done before.

CS:
Is that something you want to do more of in the future?

MK:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that's how one's practice grows. It's your own capacity, too, but it’s not just your ability, it's what you're able to start doing with other people that keeps informing yourself. So yeah, absolutely.

LM:
I feel like there is this kind of recurring theme about collaboration, whether it's with your mother, or with the materials themselves, or with the team that you have working in your studio. What do you feel is your role in this ecosystem that you're creating as it grows over time?

MK:
In the beginning, when I was making work in the basement of my previous apartment or in the backyard, and I didn't have any resources, I absolutely had to rely on myself and do everything on my own, which definitely had its perks, but I felt like there's only so much I can do as a single-bodied person, especially when it comes to building things. So I think that there came a moment where I was like, “How can I do more?” Whenever I’d hear about a creative practice, it always sounded like it was just one person—but being in the field, having my own practice, there was a slow realization of how unrealistic that is sometimes. I mean, there are definitely practices that allow that, but that wasn’t the case for me. I would probably just, like, break myself if I tried to do everything, and that's just in the parameter of my own shop. Then, once I started working with other creatives and builders, [I found that] you can do so much more. That’s actually the foundation of an architectural project, right? The office is such a small portion of the project. Working with Giancarlo was a good indicator of that, too, because we worked with so many artisans and so many craftspeople to realize a project, and at the end of the day, the final product we delivered was so heavily informed by these people that we worked with, because we would only start with a certain direction and then we're really responding to what is possible in that scenario. We find a scenario, try to go that way, and then when you look back, you realize what a crazy path you had to go through to realize that project. It’s completely out of your control as a “designer.”

CS:
Absolutely—and I think it raises this larger question as to how you see your practice growing over time. Could you see things potentially going full circle, in terms of reintegrating elements of an architectural practice and scaling up to more spatial concerns?

MK:
Yeah, I think so. I never really took that out of the picture. I think I'd like to be very much that way. Even when I was leaving Giancarlo's office and leaving that scale of practice, like an architectural practice, I kind of felt like this was almost an expedited way for me to have a more interesting architectural practice, rather than pursuing and staying at a design office. If you have your own creative practice, you're given more control or more voice, and that's really hard to earn as a young designer in the field. So I'm kind of hoping that working at this scale will eventually bring me back there.

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