Design Miami 2010 (part two)

Design Miami 2010
Part Two

Talking Furniture
“Creating a dialogue” between furnishings, or between works of art, is one of the stock phrases used by dealers to explain the way they curate their galleries. It’s an unassailable bit of jargon because it can mean anything: the “dialogue,” after all, can be a shouting match.

Johnson Trading Gallery of New York, however, has devised a space in which the phrase actually makes sense. Owner Paul Johnson is displaying both mid-century and contemporary pieces made of materials as diverse as wood and Delaware bluestone, but which spring from the same mindset. In Johnson’s booth is a Sixties George Nakashima desk paired with a zebrawood “Writing Chair” by studio designer David Ebner. These pieces stand in contrast and in harmony with stone pieces—chairs, a table, and a desk—by the contemporary designer Max Lamb. Sitting amid these pieces is a burlwood coffee table made by the late northern California designer and sculptor J.B. Blunck, under whom Lamb studied. If, in Nakashima’s famed apercu—he and designers like Ebner and Blunck seek to reveal “the soul of a tree,” Lamb has found the soul of a stone.

P.S. There is work by another Lamb on display at Johnson Trading Gallery—Walter Lamb, a midcentury California-based designer best known for his outdoor furniture made from surplus bronze tubing garnered from the U.S. Navy. Johnson has a pair of chairs that, at first glance, appear to be to be Paul Frankl rattan pieces—the well-known design with an oblong sandwich of bentwood forms that make up the armrests and skids of the chair. That’s what I thought they were, anyway. When I reached down and felt cold metal instead of warm wood, I thought I might have had a stroke.

Isn’t it Good—Korean Wood

The design world, at least, is doing its part to level the trade deficit with South Korea. The collecting market for classic American modern pieces is booming in the Asian country. In turn, work by contemporary Korean designers is appearing with more and more frequency in U.S. galleries, or being exhibited abroad by Korean dealers. Case in point: Gallery Seomi from Seoul, which has participated in Design Miami events—in Florida and in Basel, Switzerland—for the past three years.

Previously, Seomi had presented pieces composed of ceramics, stone, metal, and other “cold,” so to speak, materials. This year, however, the emphasis is on wood-based works that—judging by the fact that the gallery has sold almost all its stock—is very appealing to a Western aesthetic. Of particular note is the 2010 “Steam Series” by the 30-year-old designer Bae Sehwa. The designs are made of stack-laminated strips of walnut, which are steamed until they are pliable. The wood is then molded to create curved seating sections, opening up interstices between the walnut strips. On a more luxurious plane are the “From Glitter” tables and seating pieces by Kang Myung Sun, who painstakingly applies broad swathes of mother of pearl to a black-lacquered wood base. The pieces glow and sparkle in a way that would have made that past master of exotic materials, Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann, fume with envy.

Bold Face Names

Yes, the moment you’ve been waiting for: celebrity sightings (although many of these luminaries were not personally eyeballed by your humble correspondent).

At the Design Miami preview night, Calvin Klein and model Naomi Campbell were spotted making the rounds of dealer booths. Pharrel, the hip-hop star/fashionista/budding furniture designer, has also been a popular presence. Others making the rounds at Art Basel and other Miami Beach venues: Steve Martin, a longtime and astute art collector, flush with the critical success of his new novel, “An Object of Beauty,” which is set in the art gallery world. Ben Stiller (whoda thunk it?), Danny Glover, Adrien Brody, Julian Lennon, and, bless him, George Hamilton—still working on his tan.

—Greg Cerio