Furniture readily evokes images of a warmly lit woodshop, the smell of freshly planed cedar, and the pleasant rhythm of a mallet fitting dovetail joints, but Tokujin Yoshioka builds chairs in an unusual way that would make Willy Wonka proud. The Japanese designer has crafted luxury housewares for Kartell, envisioned boutique interiors for Issey Miyake, yet his latest project, the Spider's Thread chair, is manufactured in the same way a confectioner produces rock candy.
Yoshioka has been exploring crystallization as a medium for years. Previously, he has encased canvases and freeze-dried flowers in crystal husks by submerging them in a supersaturated mineral bath for long periods and allowing a process called crystal nucleation to take place.
His latest work is even more adventurous, relying on a substrate of just seven silk threads that sketch the ghostly outline of a chair within a metal frame. The frame was submerged in a tank of minerals and over a period of months the crystals coalesced, transforming limp threads into a structure that can stand on its own.
"In the process of crystallized project, I came up with the idea of creating a structure with threads," says Yoshioka. "I chose a form of chair because, as a structural creation, a chair is such symbolic form all over the world."
The sculpture has no bearing weight and even if it could support a person, its surface is closer to that of a porcupine than plush club chair. Aesthetically, influences for the Spider's Thread chair can be seen in Yoshioka's crystal work for Cartier and Swarovski, but he credits a short story from 1918 as the inspiration for the piece.
In this fable, a man was able to see a sinner in hell who committed a single good deed in life—sparing the life of a spider in his path. The viewer took a strand of silk from the spider and dropped it into hell, offering it to the sinner as a means of escape. The climb was slow, but salvation was in view when other condemned souls tried to follow him up the thread, stretching it out and increasing the climb. The sinner tried to kick the others off, concerned only with his own salvation, and in turn the thread broke leaving him condemned to an eternity of torment. The story, by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, is about patience and the quest for the sublime, themes made tangible in Yoshioka's collection.
"Through the creation collaborated with nature, I go through variety of experiments such as finding the unimaginable beauty or facing the unexpected mistakes over and over again during creation," says Yoshioka.
Unlike other types of fabrication, there is no way to measure the progress of these designs. Obscured in a foggy bath of minerals, Yoshioka must rely on his faith in chemistry and his own skills that the crystals are forming and that given time, they will yield an object of immense beauty.
The Spider's Thread chair is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo.
