At first glance, Yumi Hasegawa’s sculptures look like something out of a dream. Dining chairs curve into arcs as fluid as brushstrokes. Coffee tables fold delicately, their edges crossing like the wings of paper cranes. Stools stretch and twist until they resemble dancers caught mid-turn. It’s only when you approach more closely that you realize: these impossibly light forms are not made of paper, but wood.
Hasegawa, a Japanese sculptor based in Kyoto, has built an international reputation for transforming wooden furniture into what she calls “functional origami.” Using a combination of traditional steam-bending and contemporary woodworking techniques, she reshapes everyday furniture into fluid, folded forms that look too graceful to be real.
“I wanted to teach stiff wood how to move,” Hasegawa says, describing her practice with a gentle laugh. “Furniture has always been seen as fixed, obedient. But I see it as a material waiting to dance.”
From Architecture to Sculpture
Hasegawa trained as an architect before shifting to sculpture. Her early work dealt with modular structures, but she found herself increasingly fascinated by the lines of furniture,particularly chairs. “Architecture is big, monumental. A chair is small, intimate. But both are about holding the body,” she explains. “I realized a chair could tell the same story as a building, only closer to the skin.”
Her breakthrough came in 2015 when she exhibited a piece titled Folded Chair No. 1 at the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art. The work looked like an ordinary wooden dining chair until you noticed its backrest: instead of standing upright, it bent forward in a graceful arc, as though bowing. Viewers described it as both humorous and strangely poignant, an object acknowledging the people who would sit upon it.
The Craft of Bending Wood
The process behind Hasegawa’s pieces is laborious. She begins with ordinary furniture,often mass-produced pieces from thrift shops,and then subjects them to a combination of steam, pressure, and cutting. Wooden slats are heated until pliable, then coaxed into unexpected curves. The artist often describes this as a negotiation rather than a command.
“Wood doesn’t like to fold the way paper does,” she says. “Every piece has its own grain, its own stubbornness. I never know exactly where it will give way. I bend a little, wait, bend again. It’s like a conversation.”
The resulting sculptures balance fragility with resilience. Some resemble folded fans, others seem to twist like ribbons. In one striking series, a row of identical chairs has been bent into increasingly exaggerated poses, as if caught in a slow-motion sequence of gymnastics.
Furniture as Performance
Though sculptural, Hasegawa insists her works are still furniture. “I don’t want to strip them of their identity,” she says. “They are chairs and tables, just… transformed.” Many remain technically usable, though often in impractical ways: a folded chair might hold you, but you sit at a precarious tilt; a bent table still supports a teacup, though only at a single corner.
In exhibitions, Hasegawa sometimes invites visitors to sit on her works, turning the gallery into an experimental tea room. The act of sitting becomes performative, a negotiation between comfort and instability. “You become part of the fold,” she explains.
Cultural Roots and Inspirations
Hasegawa’s work draws deeply from Japanese aesthetics. She cites origami as an obvious influence, but also ma,the Japanese concept of negative space and intervals. “When I fold a chair, I am not only shaping wood, I am shaping the empty spaces around it. A fold is both material and air.”
She also acknowledges the influence of traditional crafts such as bamboo weaving, where strength emerges through tension and flexibility. “I want furniture to feel alive in the same way a woven basket does,” she says.
The Reception and Beyond
Collectors and museums have taken keen interest in Hasegawa’s work, and her pieces are now part of design collections in Tokyo, London, and New York. Critics praise her ability to “retrain the eye”,to make us see something as ordinary as a chair with fresh wonder.
Yet Hasegawa herself seems less concerned with fame than with continuing her experiments. She is currently working on a series of folding benches inspired by origami animals, each one suggesting the curve of a crane’s wing or the bend of a koi fish.
“I don’t want to make furniture more beautiful,” she says thoughtfully. “I want to make it more surprising. When you see a chair bow, or a table fold, you realize the world is less fixed than you thought. Even wood can learn to move.”
In Hasegawa’s hands, furniture is no longer heavy, or immobile. It becomes pliant, poetic,caught between utility and impossibility. Her sculptures remind us that the most familiar objects can still astonish, if only we learn to bend our assumptions.
