Bronze Vein Chair is a minimal chair designed by Brooklyn-based studio Chen Chen & Kai Williams for Emma Scully Gallery as part of her on-going exhibition Cast Iron, presenting from May 13th to June 25th, 2021. In this new series titled Cast Iron, New York City-based design gallerist and curator Emma Scully commissioned eight disparate voices around the world to create work in cast iron; young designers making digital files materialized in a symbol of the 19th century industrial revolution. A marriage of the material origins of industrial making and current digital hyper-connectivity of design ideas

Ten years ago, Murray Moss asked the duo to repair an old cast iron task chair. When they looked into the process, they realized it was like a structural version of kintsugi. The repairing weld is made of bronze which is much more valuable than the broken cast iron. The work looks maximalist, but the studio was educated at Pratt in a very Bauhaus lineage, to use the necessary structural elements as decoration. Seam lines are undesirable traces of the manufacturing process, here they have emphasized them in bronze as an accent to the piece.

The piece is on view at Emma Scully Gallery, 16 E 79th Street, New York NY 10075.

Photography by Chris Mottalini