"Minhwa" Chair

Words and Images by Sarah Jang

Even before I knew what to call them, I always felt called by the Minhwa and calligraphy adorning the walls of my home. The spirits within the folk art and ancient proverbs would hover over me as I slept, a halo of protection against my identity crisis. The depictions of folk people cheerfully dancing, mischievously gossiping, and mindlessly daydreaming would tickle my unconscious mind, stirring a deep sense of cultural pride. I rested at home and reawakened with confidence in my roots before stepping back out into a world that so often considers me foreign.

Minhwa is a traditional Korean folk art style known for its vibrant colors and symbolic depictions of nature, animals, people, and everyday objects. The artists were often anonymous and untraceable, which is why the style literally translates to “painting of the people,” capturing the spirit of everyday life and the world around them. Perhaps that is why the paintings on my walls never felt like distant artifacts, but like neighbors: ordinary people, caught mid-laugh.

Likewise, flat-pack furniture is a kind of “design of the people,” democratizing access to furniture worldwide, though often at the expense of cultural identity. The same pale, unadorned pieces fill homes from Seoul to New York, translating every culture into one universal, easily assembled language. Culture is unapologetically vibrant and layered, so there’s something a little sad about celebrating its reduction into something easier to ship. The Minhwa Chair marks the beginning of a series exploring the fusion of historically ornate aesthetics with the globalised harmony in modern furniture, asking whether the two can speak to each other without one being overshadowing the other.

The upholstered back was laser-cut from suede leather using an image trace of an antique Minhwa painting featuring a crane, a common symbol of longevity, good fortune, and peace in Asian culture. Like the spirits that once watched over my sleep, the crane now rests at the sitter’s back, translated from paint into suede.

Modeled in SolidWorks, the chair’s components were flattened into vector files for CNC machining and cut from ½-inch plywood using slotting, finger, and dovetail joints inspired by the interlocking timber systems of traditional Korean Hanok roof construction. The chair requires no hardware to assemble, as the joinery locks the pieces in place. Here, an ancestral building method is rewritten in the language of digital fabrication, and a flat sheet of plywood is coaxed back into a form with dimension and memory.

While exemplified through Korean folk art, the Minhwa Chair suggests how functional design could embrace rather than reduce personal and cultural aesthetics. To me, translation is not about finding a perfect equivalent, but about carrying something across without losing its spirit, the way I carry the paintings of my childhood home into every space I enter. Future explorations include simplifying the chair’s construction so that it functions as a versatile canvas for artwork and storytelling across cultures, so that others, too, might find a piece of home watching over them. I dream of a dining table surrounded by these chairs, each upholstered back telling a story from a different culture. Globalization and the rush of the modern world so often dim these traditions, leaving their children lost between worlds, but together, these chairs give each one its own spotlight.