Hiragi Yuki

Working with chairs̶the pieces of furniture closest to the human body̶Yuki Hiragi reexamines the structure of the emotion we call “attachment” that people develop toward objects. His forms, which retain traces of handcraft, move back and forth between functionality and symbolism, unsettling the boundary between use and sensation. Through a practice that traverses craft, art, and design, Hiragi seeks to retrieve emotions and memories often overlooked in everyday life, and to reinterpret contemporary relationships between people and objects. At the core of his making is the creation of a “place” where function and sensibility stand in tension yet ultimately achieve harmony. A chair is both the smallest architecture that supports the body and a sculpture that holds emotion. Moving between these two roles, Hiragi discovers beauty in use and restores the tangible reality of living through feeling. By embracing the layered temporality of wood as a material and the traces left by the hand, he attempts to give form to the richness of objects aging alongside those who use them.