Bubu 1er Lamp Table Lamp

Made between 1996 and 1998, Tobias Wong’s Ottoman Lamp is one of his earliest examples of “readydesigns”. Wong coined this term to characterize the creative process by which he openly consumed previously designed objects and modified them slightly resulting in a new creation with its own usage and conceptual depth. Inspired by Marcel Duchamp and the Fluxus movement, Wong sought to palliate what he identified as a “nostalgia for the futuristic”1 in the late 1990s and early 2000s. By this he meant that despite most designed objects being marketed as originals, they actually corresponded to “what people in the 1960’s and early 80’s predicted we’d make” and ended up being “fantasies from forty years ago.”2 By using objects that had already been designed as the basis for his creations, Wong was one of first designers to provocatively show how creativity in design could be re-imagined within a world where designed goods are mass-produced, reproduced, and consumed.


To make Ottoman Lamp, Wong placed a lightbulb inside a Philippe Starck Bubu 1er stool. The bulb was placed on a socket which was connected to a beaded brass pull cord on one side of the stool and an outgoing coiled plastic electric wire with a plug on the other. Starck’s Bubu 1er stool was designed in the early 1990s and produced by the French furniture company XO in 1996. Following the famed French designer’s philosophy of democratic design, it was made of moulded plastic so that it could be mass-produced and purchased at an affordable cost. It’s simple post-modern, rounded, and whimsically organic design made it an instant success across the globe. More than just a seating device, it could also be used as a small table or a universal container as its detachable lid enabled consumers to fill it with virtually anything, allowing them to transform this stool into a laundry basket or even an ice bucket. By “readydesigning” it into a lamp, Wong was feeding into the versatility of Starck’s creation and taking it to another level as he changed the nature of its utility entirely. Ottoman Lamp could be identified as the prototype or ancestor of Wong’s 2001 This is a Lamp for which he once again transformed one of Starck’s designs, this time his Kartell Bubble Club Chair, into a lighting fixture. Wong revealed his creation at the InTransit exhibition by Terminal-NYC a day before Starck’s chair was meant to make its US debut. In what was his first major design coup and was perceived as a radically bold and avant-gardist move at the time, in his own uniquely humorous and irreverent way Wong managed to simultaneously question notions of originality and authorship in design while simultaneously attracting a great deal of mediatic attention that would launch his career as a key New York based conceptual designer throughout the 2000s.




Footnotes:

1 Tobias Wong, “This is a Lamp.” Brokenoff.com, http://www.brokenoff.com/this.html, (last accessed: 06/11/2024)

2 Ibid.

Bubu 1er Lamp Table Lamp; Designed by Tobias Wong (1974–2010); injection-molded polypropylene, coiled plastic covered electrical copper wire, plug, light bulb, brass pull chord; H x diam. (overall): 44.1 × 33.7 cm (17 3/8 × 13 1/4 in.) H x diam. (lid): 1 × 31.8 cm (3/8 × 12 1/2 in.) H x diam. (base): 43.2 × 33.7 cm (17 in. × 13 1/4 in.); The Tobias Wong Collection, Gift of Phyllis Chan and Gordon Wong; 2024-4-39-a,b