Every piece of furniture is made in one year and used for many after. Alongside the year it was made, each piece in this exhibition carries a second date: the year it will be used.
A tear-off calendar counts time one day at a time, a page torn off each morning. Furniture runs on a longer clock. It is one of the few things we buy expecting it to outlast us, so every chair is already a guess about the future: who will sit here, and in what kind of city?
The nine full-scale pieces on show were designed by Year 3 students of the PolyU School of Design and made in local factories through the Hong Kong Furniture and Decoration Trade Association. Each hangs a leaf from an old Hong Kong calendar, printed with the year it belongs to. Arranged by date, the works move from Reality to Possibility, Fantasy and Abstraction — from today's Tsim Sha Tsui to a leaf with no date on it.
You are welcome to touch the material and to sit down. At selected times during the exhibition, guided tours with VR headsets let visitors stay seated and look out at the year on the leaf, from the furniture's own point of view.The future shown here begins in the present, in the seat you are sitting in.
