The Way We Face Leather

2018
Dutch Design Week 2018
Eindhoven, The Netherlands

The Materialists X Leather Exhibition

Directed & Curated by The Materialists (Woo Jai Lee, Sooji Lee, Pao Hui Kao)
Participating Designers: Woo Jai Lee, Pao Hui Kao, Roxane Lahidji, Agnieszka Mazur, Soyoun Kim, Seungbin Yang, Nai Dan Chang, Hyunjee Jung

Luxury, craftsmanship, respect, and traditions are among others synonymous of leather. Centuries of techniques and experiences have conveyed to this material its pride and dignity. Yet, with industrialisation, leather didn’t escape the metamorphosis that rumbled the production world. With the large scales of production and consumption came the problems of wastage, as for any other material, which signified both a loss of money and of valuable resources.

Starting from the factories’ wastages, eight designers dived into the possibilities of these devalued and emptied skins in order to raise new potentials for what was once a highly esteemed material. Drawing from their non-traditional and unorthodox ways of working, the designers proposed their own path to resolve the challenge, yet always with the colourful attitude specific to the Dutch design mentality.

From the direct reuse of the lacy skins to their reduction into a fine powder, the designers proposed eight views on how to deal with such devalued material in order to reveal its inherent potentials. As Lavoisier would phrase it, nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed

Leather Paper Cow by Woo Jai Lee

Medina by Agnieszka Mazur

by Hyunjee Jung

by Roxane Lahidji

Moonument by Soyoun Kim

Soaked Out by Pao Hui Kao

Revival by Seungbin Yang