Basic Instinct, Chen Chen and Kai William’s newest exhibition of work with The Future Perfect, shows the design duo leaning into the possibilities of wood as a medium between the unknowability of the natural world and the designer’s own lexicon of art-making. They are attempting to understand their own place in the chain of material production, and seeking ways in which that placement might present opportunities for the sourcing of their materials and production of their work might live a rich and thought provoking life similar to that of the finished objects.
“The wood from this new series was found on the ground,” write Chen and Kai, “It comes from city trees exhausted from living, rotting. In Brooklyn, people treat the dirt rectangles around trees as if they are capable of transmutation. Lean a flat-screen TV there and it will come back in the spring as flowering weeds.”
Chen and Williams leave segments of tree trunks in their original forms and find strong silhouettes: athletic crotches like Brancusi’s emergent Torso of a Young Man or Sharon Stone’s provocations in the titular Basic Instinct. These wild forms were spared the milling process – but become intertwined with the rigor woodworking tradition, the grid, and metal. Retaining the roundness of wood keeps the pieces in tension with Chen and Kai’s work with stones; they are cross-sectioned yet rough and not entirely incomplete. Seeing the raw center of a material and its natural contour prompts us to imagine the space around it. Where could it have come from? Where is its other half? Separated now, where might it go?
Basic Instinct will be on view in The Future Perfect’s New York home through January 2026.
