Nee Nee Collective Presents HOMEomorphism

For the recent Dutch Design Week 2020, Netherlands- and South Korea-based Nee Nee Collective presented HOMEomorphism, an exhibition inspired by the changing nature of the home in the face of global stay-home orders. We speak with the designers to find out more about their practice and this inaugural project

Design Anthology: How and when did you all meet?

Nee Nee Collective (Ahn, Hansol Kim, Kurina Sohn, Sho Ota, Shun Yoon and June Park): Ahn, Kurina, Sol, Sho and June all met in 2017 while studying for their master’s at Design Academy Eindhoven. Sho and Shun then met in 2019, when they were participating in a group exhibition during Dutch Design Week. We enjoyed each other’s work ethics, methodologies and work, and we all kept up with one another’s work on social media and at exhibitions before forming a collective.

Where are you all from originally?

Five of us are from different cities in South Korea, and Sho is from Japan. We all met in Eindhoven, except for Shun, who joined us this year from The Hague when he graduated from the Royal Academy of Art. Currently, we all have our own ateliers in Eindhoven and The Hague, from which we can all pursue our own practices.

What made you decide to come together as a collective?

It was the COVID-19 pandemic that really made us come together. For this year’s Dutch Design Week we decided to curate our own virtual exhibition, HOMEomorphism. In preparing and executing the exhibition, we had many online meetings sharing our opinions and inspirations, which led to the formation of Nee Nee.

Can you tell us more about the idea behind the exhibition?

We were inspired by the changing definition of home — the name describes the continuous deformation of something that leads to a new form. Our research explored the representation of nature, the handcrafted, the role of objects and the current cultural landscape. HOMEomorphism is a collection of the pieces each of us made in lockdown, so they’re infused with our own experiences and artistic practices. The pieces are the result of considering the possibilities of homes of the future, where meaning and form are constantly being bent and stretched.

Can you tell us a bit about each of the pieces?

Ahn’s candle is a representation of his body, sitting cross-legged, in candle form. It’s an exploration of religious iconography and archetypes, as well as technology like 3D scanning and printing, and it deals with the discourse of defining individuality in this era.

Hansol Kim’s ±15 Cloth/Shelving Unit is a sculptural piece that questions what it means to wear something, shortening the dimensions of a pullover to experiment with the distance between a body and its clothes and how that changes the meaning of wearing something.

Inspired by the empty stillness of a fish tank, Kurina Sohn’s OFF_BLUE sculptures relate to nature as it is represented and contained in a domestic space. Sho Ota’s Surfaced #11 is made from pieces of wood that are assembled in various structural compositions, with surfaces giving the object a function. By playing on the relationship between surfaces and structures, the piece invites users rethink their relationship to the objects in their daily life.

Shun Yoon’s Orbit collection of a floor lamp and pots are derived from the methodology of making coiled springs but are realised as fully handcrafted gestures.

June Park created the exhibition’s virtual platform. It’s a response to how the Internet and the screen have become an essential connection to the outside world, and experiments with the possibilities of a two-dimensional website as an alternative platform for an exhibition.

What's next for Nee Nee Collective?

As a collective, we want to create a new iteration of this exhibition that includes those working in disciplines like painting, photography, textile design, graphic design and programming. We want to explore our interest in the domestic landscape, so our aim is to discover the layers of hidden contexts in our daily lives and experiment with various interventions that can be revealed as new gestures to reflect our interest.

Images / Yuta Sawamura