For two months this winter, a pair of chairs has sat in a window display on Ice House Street in Central, Hong Kong, serving as a testament to the mysteries of the creative mind.  

 

At first glance, they are a variation of designer Ron Arad’s seminal Rover chair, which he created in 1981 from a discarded car seat and metal tubing he found in a London junkyard. But written on the back is an odd handwritten message laser-carved into a metal sheet: “No one except maybe Prouvé has seen the back of this 1924 chair.” 

 

This is the Twenty-Four chair, which Arad made for an exhibition in Paris in 2024, and which has been on display at NUOVO’s exhibition Ron Arad: Love of Hong Kong since early December. The story behind it goes back to Arad’s last days as a student at the Architectural Association in London, in 1973, when he nearly failed to graduate because he had lost a library book on French designer Jean Prouvé. He got his degree after paying a fine, but the book remained missing for years until Arad happened to find it on one of his shelves at home. Rifling through, he came across a design for a chair that was eerily similar to the Rover chair.  

 

“He copied me before I was born,” says Arad with a smirk.  

 

At the time he came up with the Rover chair, Arad was toying with ideas of Surrealism and the significance of found materials. “My reference was more to Marcel Duchamp and Dada, and ready-made and found objects,” he says. “So Prouvé wasn’t on my mind, but there it is, this chair, in a book of mine at home.” It was depicted in just one photograph; no physical trace of the chair exists. 

 

 

Whether coincidence or the product of a tiny grain planted in Arad’s mind by Prouvé, the Rover chair vaulted the Israeli-born designer into international prominence. Rover positioned furniture as an act of assembly rather than refinement, raising questions of authorship, function and finish. Like the flamboyant, colourful pieces created by Memphis Group designers in Milan, Rover marked a pivotal shift towards postmodernism, but in a markedly different way that laid bare the material experimentations and industrial processes behind the creation of furniture. 

 

What followed has been a long career that has produced furniture pieces, artworks and the occasional building. Pieces like the Bookworm shelf and Tom Vac chair retained a sinuous, engineered character while embracing industrial production, proving that conceptual design need not remain rarefied. This balance was echoed in works such as the Big Easy chair, whose swollen steel form exaggerated the logic of bending and mass, and the Well Tempered Chair, which exposed sheets of tempered steel held in tension by bolts, turning structural stress into visual drama.  

 

 

New from old 

 

At the same time, Arad was increasingly drawn to spectacle and scale, producing limited editions and installations that pushed materials like steel and aluminium to expressive extremes. A little over 10 years ago, he was preparing for an exhibition at the Design Museum in Holon, Israel, a sculptural building of flowing, corten steel ribbons that he himself had designed. He glanced outside at his old Fiat 500 and was struck by inspiration: he wanted to squash it.  

 

Arad had begun compressing metal objects in the late 1980s, turning them into metal bricks in a kind of reserve assembly line. But Pressed Flowers, as his series would later be named, took things even further: each colourful Fiat would be flattened by a 500-tonne industrial press into an almost cartoonish piece of art.  

 

“I went to this place in Italy where a family had a whole garage devoted to them — they had a yard full of them,” says Arad. “And I told them what I wanted to do. They started crying. I said, ‘Look, I’m not destroying them. I’m immortalising them.’”  

 

 

You could call it creative destruction, except Arad rejects the term: there’s no destruction when you are simply changing an object into something else. By way of example, he pulls out a tablet and opens a video of a 2019 project in Toronto, where he created an 88-foot-tall public sculpture called “Safe Hands,” consisting of two intertwined stainless-steel towers of twisted tubular forms. In the clip, Arad is standing with some metalworkers next to the tube that will form part of the sculpture. He takes a hammer and gleefully bonks the tube, crumpling it.  

 

What inspires the irreverence that seems to permeate his work?  

 

“What? Irreverent?” remarks Arad when presented with the term. “I’m doing beautiful things. I’m not fighting against anything. I’m not breaking boundaries. Because I don’t believe in boundaries — there’s nothing to break.”  

 

But he does accept that, if anything, his work is cheeky. “Yes, there is humour,” he concedes. “I mean, look — one of my early pieces was called Concrete Stereo. Just look at it.” He pulls up an image on his tablet. The 1983 piece, now part of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) collection, embeds speakers and a record player within blocks of seemingly crumbling concrete.  

 

“I thought, ‘I'm making a beautiful object.’ But the French called it ruinist. So when they had the 10th anniversary of the Centre Pompidou [in 1987] they invited me to show it, because they thought, oh, maybe it’s a good idea to have a ruinist there. So I was the ruinist, but I didn’t agree with the interpretation.” He shrugs. 

 

Whatever form his work takes, it’s driven by a restless curiosity about how things are made — and how they might be made otherwise.  

 

 

The beauty of a found object 

 

“I jump from one thing to another. That’s what I do,” says Arad. “Because materials and technologies are tools. The question is what to do with them.” 

 

Sometimes the answer is: nothing at all. One of the pieces exhibited at NUOVO is a chair that Arad stumbled across while walking around Hong Kong on a previous visit. It has four dark, turned wooden legs, from which rises a circular backrest framed in black, its surface printed with a portrait of Marilyn Monroe; the worn, teal-blue upholstered seat is inscribed with handwritten Chinese characters: 有用 (jau5 jung6, “useful”) on the left and 勿取走 (mat6 ceoi2 zau2, “do not take away”) on the right.  

 

“I saw this and I thought, ‘This is like, a perfect, perfect found object.’ Which figure would you use in a found object? Marilyn Monroe, of course. Ask Andy [Warhol]. And the fact that it had instructions — ‘Do not move it’ — reminds me of other stuff, like Duchamp’s rubber breast: ‘Please touch.’” (Marcel Duchamp and Enrico Donati’s provocative 1947 artwork was titled “Prière de toucher.”)  

 

“I mean, what could be a better ready-made than this ready-made? And so I had to buy it. I found the owner and paid a whole 10 dollars for it.” 

 

Arad signed his name just under the portrait of Monroe. Then he put the chair into storage.  

 

Ron Arad: Love of Hong Kong runs until 31 January 2026 at NUOVO, Unit G03, The Galleria, 9 Queen’s Road Central (entrance on Ice House Street). 

 

To view Ron Arad’s session at Business of Design Week (BODW) Summit 2025, please visit bodw+   

 

Writer: Christopher DeWolf   

 

This column is produced in partnership with Zolima CityMag, an online magazine that explores Hong Kong’s arts, design, history and culture.