Abbas Kiarostami, the Iranian auteur-director renowned for his meditative and naturalist films like Where is the friend's home, Taste of cherry, The wind will carry us, sometimes presents himself as an artist and photographer. In 2005, he transformed one of the galleries in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London into something forestal. Titled Forest without leaves, the room was densely populated by tall pillars as tree trunks, and visitors were encouraged to enter this walkthrough installation. The trees were made up of huge hollow tubes completely wrapped up in life-size photographic images of bark, and were raised from the brown carpeted floor. Bringing nature into culture, Kiarostami poses a question as to what it means to bring things to the museum. By means of trees without substance, he might have noted that the museum is an artificial environment. The artificiality is not necessarily discreditable, though, when we lose our curiosity to observe attentively things around us. If things are framed and placed in the museum, we often regain the capacity to take a closer and more in-depth look at them.
Kiarostami’s use of forest echoes a fundamental element of interactions between the museum space and its spectator. The museum is a forest that holds mystery and discovery. Just as you should attend to space between lines when you read books, you should walk the space between exhibits in the museum that is as significant as the space that exhibits occupy. It is thus no wonder to find that a museum draws on the composition of forest, both as a metaphor and as an actuality, in structuring its space to provoke a sense of mystery and discovery, which is the case in the Hermès Museum in Seoul. This museum is part of the Maison Hermès Dosan Park, the luxury brand’s fourth flagship store in the world. Along with shopping areas, the store has an art gallery called the Atelier Hermès, and a museum named the Promenade.
The Promenade takes the form of forest designed by art director Hilton McConnico. It is constituted by columns sheathed in vibrato leather, which hints at the original specialty of the Hermès as a harness workshop. Whereas Kiarostami's trees were hollow, the leather-clad trees in the Promenade contain glass cases, and through the windows, we can look at exhibits inside the trees. What is displayed here comes from the historic collection of the Hermès. There are Hermès goods produced since the 19th century, such as a model pair of calfskin doll gloves made in 1938 which the city of Paris presented to the Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret of the UK, and a mini Mangeoire Corde in white swift calfskin from the S/S 2005 collection based on the Mangeoire bag made in 1949. There is also what the Hermès family has been collecting for inspiration. The collection ranges from a bronze horse statue of the Hellenism period, a dragon-engraved saddle from the 15th-century Tibet, a Parisian saddler's signboard called St. Eloi's Bouquet in the 19th century, shoes for mower-pulling horses made in Scotland in 1860, an iron spur with eight silver-inlaid arms from the 19th-century Mexico, and Japanese artist Takehiko Sanada’s sculpture made of horsehair in 2002. While strolling through the immersive forest, your view of the Hermès may move from a desire for a luxury brand to an interest in the workmanship of people who have established and developed what comes to attain the current standing of the brand. It is as if the historical collection in the basement symbolically props up what is going on with the Hermès today.
In a way, the Promenade greatly contributes to making the whole Maison Hermès as a museum-like place. After staying in this ethereal blue-green forest, go up to the Atelier Hermès and you will find changing exhibitions of cutting-edge contemporary art which the Hermès foundation supports as an art patron. Particularly when the Atelier puts on artworks produced site-specifically to the Hermès space, such as Daniel Buren's Filtres colorés: travail in situ (2006) and Jim Lambie's Nervous track (2009), the entire building, whose exterior is coated with serigraphic stripes of gold copper, becomes a work of art itself. All these spatial dimensions together with the artistic display of goods add up to the Maison Hermès that creates an impression of grandeur and refinement. What it thereby tries to attract is not merely consumers' money but their cultural mind. Don't be kept away on the ground that you are not well-off enough; you don't need to purchase an Hermès. Take "maison" as "musée" and simply enjoy the luxury of making your own discoveries from the forest of wonder.
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