MeongSeok Bench

Meongseok is a traditional straw mat, woven from rice straw and laid out in a courtyard or on a wooden porch to dry grain or to serve as a place for people to sit and lie down. Architecturally, it embodies a horizontal structure that spreads flat against the earth — the inverse of a roof rising toward the sky; formally, its essence lies in the lattice pattern created by tightly woven straw strands together with the flexibility to be rolled and unrolled. Symbolically, it is a tool that has long held people and grain, labor and rest, at the lowest point of daily life: where the roof marks the summit at which a hanok meets the sky, meongseok marks the lowest point at which it meets the ground. Traditionally, sitting on a meongseok meant lowering the body to the ground and meeting the entire unrolled surface at once — a floor-based mode of sitting. MeongSeok Bench begins at the point where this idea of "sitting by unrolling onto the floor" is translated into the Western idea of "sitting by being raised up." Rather than leaving the meongseok's plane flat, the piece rolls that very plane upward to construct the seat and backrest of a raised, Western-style chair. The tight, evenly spaced weave of slender wooden slats carries over the meongseok's method of weaving straw into a single plane, and the way this plane curls upward twice, unfolding in a wave-like rhythm, embodies the gesture of taking a single mat lying on the ground and rolling it upright by hand. In the instant the meongseok is rolled up, the low plane where body once met floor is lifted to the height of a seat, and the plane that once lay open to the sky turns to become a backrest. The gaps between the slats let light pass through, recalling how a meongseok let wind and light filter between its straw strands, and the smooth transition from flat plane to cylinder produces the sensory illusion of rigid wood bending as though it were fiber. This is a work that smoothly joins two cultures' ways of sitting — floor-based and chair-based — within a single material and a single gesture.