Presented at the inaugural show of the Fondazione Dries Van Noten in Venice, Seongil Choi's HMP Chair 01 builds a functional seat from folded perforated steel mesh coated in successive layers of red polyurethane.
The mesh starts flat. From there, Seongil Choi bends, folds, and layers it, working a sheet material that behaves more like paper or fabric than metal. The resulting form holds a back, a seat, a structural base with two large oval perforations, and a compressed back-rest with a smaller elliptical cut-out, all in one continuous piece of steel that curves where it needs to and holds straight where it must.
Once shaped, the structure receives multiple coats of red polyurethane, built up layer by layer until the surface hardens completely. The coating does not smooth the mesh; it encrusts it. Up close the texture is heavily stippled, the polyurethane having settled into every cell and ridge of the perforated metal before curing into something that registers between lacquer and skin. The chair's colour is a saturated red-oxide, closer to vermilion than to brick, and it reads the same from every angle because the coating buries the substrate's original reflectivity.
The logic of the process matters because the resulting object cannot be separated from it. Choi describes focusing on the balance between rigidity and flexibility, precision and variation: the goal is not a geometrically resolved form but a form that documents its own making. Where the mesh resisted, the surface buckles fractionally; where it yielded, the contour is smooth. The 400 x 600 x 830 mm dimensions are functional, the chair an actual seat, but the object's presence is that of something found rather than designed.
The red edition was produced specifically for the Fondazione Dries Van Noten's opening presentation in Venice, the colour reading as both industrial signal and deliberate provocation in a context where the surrounding building and collection carry an entirely different material register. Against a neutral grey ground in the photographs, the chair appears monolithic, lit from above so that the oval voids cast hard shadows on the interior surfaces, emphasising the depth of the coating and the structural logic of the perforations.
HMP Chair 01 sits within a longer investigation into what perforated metal mesh can become through direct manipulation. The project treats the mesh as Choi says: as a material that can be shaped in ways that resemble working with paper or fabric. The shift is from framework to rigid surface, the transformation happening not in the design phase but in the coating and curing.
