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M+, Hong Kong, © Umeda Masanori
Umeda Masanori 梅田正德
Arte Japan Ltd. ARTE JAPAN 株式會社
Prototype, Animal chair 動物椅（原型）
1982
Crouching like a friendly four-legged beast, this chair possesses a charismatic quality with its bent legs, four spherical feet, and enfolding arms. The tubular metal frame of the chair is its most eye-catching element. This material was hailed as a new staple of domestic design in the industrial age by modernist designers in the 1920s and 1930s. Early advocates typically used chrome-plated tubular steel in their designs to underscore its novelty and connection with industrial fabrication, but here Umeda specifies a brightly coloured finish that replaces modernist rigour with a postmodernist pop sensibility. The chair’s upholstery, suggestive of animal patterning, shows Umeda’s interest in surface pattern as another means of imbuing furnishings with the visual complexity and sense of fun that appealed to consumers in the 1980s.
Umeda was one of three Japanese designers to take part in the Memphis design collective, headed by Italian designer Ettore Sottsass, in whose studio Umeda worked during the 1970s.
From their provocative debut at the Salone Internazionale del Mobile in Milan in 1981, Memphis emphasised surface decoration, bright colours, and an ironic stance that rejected predominating rubrics for ‘good’ design. The resulting pastiches of high and low, historical and contemporary, and functional and symbolic, were emblematic of the larger phenomenon of postmodernism that came to define much of the art and design produced in the 1980s. Umeda contributed several projects to Memphis exhibitions in the early 1980s, and his work for Japanese manufacturers expressed much of the same spirit of levity and self-conscious artificiality in materials and forms.
Umeda was one of three Japanese designers to take part in the Memphis design collective, headed by Italian designer Ettore Sottsass, in whose studio Umeda worked during the 1970s.
From their provocative debut at the Salone Internazionale del Mobile in Milan in 1981, Memphis emphasised surface decoration, bright colours, and an ironic stance that rejected predominating rubrics for ‘good’ design. The resulting pastiches of high and low, historical and contemporary, and functional and symbolic, were emblematic of the larger phenomenon of postmodernism that came to define much of the art and design produced in the 1980s. Umeda contributed several projects to Memphis exhibitions in the early 1980s, and his work for Japanese manufacturers expressed much of the same spirit of levity and self-conscious artificiality in materials and forms.
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