A cabinet of curiosities.
project
Curiosities
client
The Hour Glass
Team
Ong Ker-Shing, Joshua Comaroff, Chen Shunann
At the re-opening of their Ngee Ann City branch, the directors of The Hour Glass (a company of art lovers) asked us to invent a collection of mysterious and intriguing objects as decor. The idea was a spin on the classic "cabinet of curiosities," a set of rare or perverse objects to tickle the fancy of the person who has seen it all.
We responded with 13 pieces (not including some coral and a huge egg), which represented a kind of mis-applied connoisseur-ship. They combine luxurious materials with references to design history and a kind of bogus ethnographic primitivism--the sort of rubbish "tribal" art sold at airports (in our case, made from machine parts and a ping-pong racquet).
All images by Studio Periphery