Chai Young Lee’s Optical Surfaces Dazzle and Delight

Chai Young Lee

is haunted by mirrors. The website of the UK and South Korean designer is rife with philosophical musings about the motif of reflection: "Because of its ability to produce repetitive images, it creates a mysterious vision which is like standing between endless spaces of reality and makes belief. When a mirror meets light (which travels so fast and in an unpredictable way in some case), together they create an unusual visionary effect." Young Lee's research in optics revolves around the seemingly limitless scope of these "unusual visionary effects." His yen to satisfy the spiritual questions bound up with reflection has an outlet in his work with optical surfaces. By fusing textiles with the traditional formula for reflectivity (strictly and helpfully defined as "the change in the direction of a wave front at an interface between two different media so that it returns into the medium from which it originated"), Young Lee aims to discover new forms of emitted light.

Wall/Hanging Mirror Lamp. Designed by Chai Young Lee.

The proposition has paid off with some intriguing results. The "Wall/Hanging Mirror Lamp" from his Collection 1 is comprised of an acrylic substrate overlaid with a semi-transparent film of aluminum. The materials are traditionally used to create the infamous prop of the two-way mirror known to all as a central player in the ever-popular police procedural, but that doesn't deter Young Lee. One of his objectives is exploring the use of familiar materials in new ways. And besides, his two-way mirror has a personality all its own, enabling it to provide an intriguing entry into some of the epistemological questions broached by the phenomena of reflection. In Wall/Hanging Mirror Lamp, the recipe is fudged enough so that, depending on the degree of illumination, a measure of incident light passes through, consequently creating "infinity lights and multiple images."

Chai Young Lee's Optical Surfaces Dazzle and Delight

Chai Young Lee's Optical Surfaces Dazzle and Delight

The visage in the glass, as it were, of this piece is of a fully-dimensional and ornately wrought chandelier, hung with ivory pearls of light. The image seems to inhabit the “space beyond” that we've all mused about at one time or another-gazing across an expanse of glassy lake, or perplexed at an absurdly elongated doppelganger in a funhouse mirror. Thus, Young Lee's piece exhibits an inviting duo of dual functionality. From the pragmatic perspective, it works as a mirror and a lamp, and from the philosophical one, it opens a window into alternative realms of variant realities-realms we knew were there all along.

See more of Chai Young Lee’s marvelous mirrors at next week’s 100% Design London.

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