A giant red metallic ribbon swivels towards the sky at Sindorim D-CUBE City’s Millefleur Park in Guro-dong, western Seoul. Taking a closer look, one can see about 24,000 tiny LED screens lined on the outside of the 17-meter-tall installation work, which features images and text such as poetry and even daily horoscopes.

“It is a carrier for more content. It avoids the failure of most public art that just sits there generation after generation,” Ron Arad, designer of the installation “VORTEXT,” told The Korea Herald on Tuesday. 

Born in Israel and currently based in London, Arad is one of today’s most renowned designer/architects, best known for his chic, metallic chairs. His works are collected by prestigious museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, but are sold at high prices at Sotheby’s and Christie’s auctions as well. He served as the head of the Department of Design Products at the Royal College of Art from 1997 to 2008.

He came up with the installation work as Gana Art Center, where Arad held a solo show in 2008 and was in charge of art consulting for the new shopping complex in Sindorim, requested a public sculpture. The production was finished after just four e-mails, said Arad, expressing praise for the Korean production team which took care of the actual production of the work here.

“The project I gave them was really difficult. Normally I am used to revising shortcomings several times, but they got it right at the first time. I was very impressed. So I went to their studio and met them. Yes, I am definitely thinking about working with them in the future,” said Arad.

Arad started out with furniture design but he is high in-demand in various other genres as well, ranging from perfume bottles to fashion design. What do people find in his works? Arad guessed that the key may be curiosity.

“I am very curious when I do a project. What will happen if I do this, if I do that? I hope people find curiosity in my works and I think they do, because otherwise we won’t be having this talk right now. There may be people who do not like my works, and that’s ok. There may be people who like my works, and that’s ok too,” said Arad.

There have been, of course, a few cases where his designs did not work out because the public or the company that commissioned it did not understand them.

This happened in Korea about 10 years ago when he went up to two big Korean companies to introduce his idea about a new IT gadget. Arad pulled out his mobile phone to show what he had designed at the time, and it was surprisingly similar to the iPad. The companies, however, did not understand it, and lost their chance to get a headstart in the tablet PC market.

When asked where he gets his brilliant ideas, he answered that you don’t get ideas from anywhere but ideas are just there.

“The first rule is to have no rules. I know every rule is temporary, so why be limited by rules?” he said.

But, of course, copying should be off limits. Arad in fact came across some chairs in D-CUBE City that copied his design. He photographed them and talked to the head of the shopping complex who called on the employees who bought them to get rid of the fakes and buy the originals.

“That was a good thing to do,” said Arad.

To designer aspirants, he had this advice:

“Don’t try to do like someone else. Don’t join the trend, create your own,” he said.

By Park Min-young  (claire@heraldcorp.com)