When I first visited South Korea in 2022, I was walking unsuspectingly through Gangnam when I entered a store and suddenly found myself standing in front of a horse whose tail was twitching as though it were trying to swat away flies.
The store belonged to the perfume brand Tamburins. What on earth was a horse, whose smell one would associate more readily with a stable than with jasmine, rose, lavender, freesia, orange blossom, geranium or magnolia, doing in a perfume shop? It was only when I stood right in front of the animal that I understood why everyone else was moving around the space so calmly and unperturbed. Of course it was not a real horse, but it was extraordinarily hyperrealistic. As more and more visitors squeezed between me and the horse to take selfies, I started thinking. What was this horse supposed to mean? Was it meant to evoke nature? Or was it an ironic reference to those perfume advertisements in which women in airy, flowing dresses ride through untouched landscapes? It was staged too unromantically for that. But it was not the typical kind of experiential retail found everywhere in Seoul either. It had too much of an art and readymade vibe. I looked around for a sign. Maybe it was art after all? But there was no information whatsoever, anywhere, explaining what exactly we were looking at or why.
“Excuse me,” I said to a sales assistant, “who is the artist of this?” I pointed, slightly embarrassed, at the horse, which perhaps was not art at all.
“Everything is made by our in-house design team,” she replied, not without pride.
I thanked her and, for the moment, accepted the answer. I still did not understand.
There are, however, good and bad ways of not understanding something. The bad ones: because nobody explained it well enough, or because you were never meant to understand it in the first place. Only a small circle of people was supposed to. Both utterly uninspiring. The good one: when someone has found a form of expression for something that nobody had previously understood. You have nothing to compare it with, but you sense that understandig will eventually arrive.
This kind of non-understanding is, for me, one of the most important criteria for good art. If I immediately understand why a motif has been staged in one particular way and not another, my interest is not aroused. But if I sense something without understanding it, if non-understanding becomes a liminal space that I myself help shape, then one of the most beautiful forms of intimacy with something new emerges.
The horse had put me in precisely that state. Except that it was in a perfume shop rather than an exhibition space.
Tamburins belongs to the South Korean company IICOMBINED, whose brands include Tamburins, the eyewear label Gentle Monster, the dessert brand Nudake and, more recently, the hat label ATiiSSU and tableware brand Nuflaat. Ever since, these brands have been putting me into this state of positive non-understanding. What kind of crazy company is this that, within just a few years, has set out from South Korea to conquer the world with a degree of conceptual independence that is rarely encountered?
IICOMBINED was founded in 2011 by Kim Han-kook, who at the time was still working for an English-language education company. Inspired by Warby Parker, he wanted to establish an eyewear label whose designs would take Asian facial features more strongly into account. Hallyu, the Korean Wave, was just beginning to spill beyond East Asia into Western Europe and the United States. Along with it came Gentle Monster, Kim Han-kook’s first brand, perched on the nose of Psy, whose “Gangnam Style” even Barack Obama claimed he could dance.
But the breakthrough arrived in 2014, when TV star Jun Ji-hyun wore Gentle Monster sunglasses in the utterly delightful K-drama My Love from the Star. After that, things happened in rapid succession. Brand ambassadors such as Blackpink’s Jennie and Tilda Swinton followed, as did collaborations with Maison Margiela, Moncler, FENDI, Prada, but also World of Warcraft and Tekken. Most recently came what is, for now, the craziest plot twist of all: a $100 million investment from Google, which plans to develop smart glasses with Gentle Monster.
From the very beginning, the brand has emphasized connectivity when it comes to sponsorships and collaborations and, even more importantly, spaces.
A few days after encountering the horse, I visited the Museum of Art in Ulsan. There I stumbled across Gentle Monster. Together with the artist collective AES+F, the label had created a surrealist campaign film that made the company’s artistic ambitions unmistakable. The film was called The Circle of Life and was described as “a journey to our origins and into our future” in which we encounter fantastic beings as though they were our dreams and in which life has neither beginning nor end.
It showed a celestial realm filled with strange hybrids of domesticated and wild animals, including a pug with tentacles and fly wings and a two-headed baby seal with chicken feet and swan wings. The aesthetic seemed familiar to me, so I googled it, and sure enough, the campaign film fitted seamlessly into AES+F’s Inverso Mundus series, which the group has been producing since 2015.
The project draws on a tradition of artworks that turn the world upside down. On their website, AES+F cite, for example, sixteenth-century engravings in which fish fly through the sky, horses ride humans and men breastfeed babies. These are reversals of roles that subtly call existing norms into question.
The campaign film works differently. It shows a group of decidedly fashionable characters reacting with astonishment to the world they are observing. Their slow-motion movements reinforce this sense of wonder. The Gentle Monster glasses on their faces are far too small for them, their lenses much too heavily tinted, and in some cases the logo, split into a G and an M, sits directly over their pupils, making it impossible to see through them.
So the glasses are obviously not being sold as a visual aid, but neither are they merely being sold as a fashion accessory. What is being sold is a particular way of seeing: enigmatic, stylized, perhaps even elitist. Anyone wearing these glasses belongs to a species that does not simply look at the world but transforms it into an art-fueled fever dream. The strange chimeras, I thought, might also represent a posthuman future in which nature is no longer natural and bodies can be combined at will. From today’s perspective, it almost seems proto-generative, as though these creatures had emerged from an AI image generator.
Back in Seoul, of course, I immediately had to visit a Gentle Monster store. It turned out that one of its best-known flagship stores at the time was in Hongdae, where I happened to be staying. Like many cutting-edge stores in Seoul, Gentle Monster occupied a freestanding, Brutalist-looking building that resembled a miniature museum.
For a moment I wondered whether it might be another venue in the major Choe U-ram retrospective I had seen at the MMCA a few days earlier. The artist is known for his kinetic, sometimes monstrous installations. In the museum foyer, he had a group of straw figures balancing a bale of hay on a metal plate.
In any case, this store was one enormous kinetic installation. On the lower floor, right in the middle of the room, stood, well, what exactly? The Greek god Atlas, perhaps? He was partly sliced into layers, like a 3D print, hunched over and holding a perforated white sphere that looked like an archaeological find or a work by Daniel Arsham. An oversized robotic arm poured a transparent liquid over it, which ran down the arms of Atlas, if that was indeed who he was, in dripping streams.
Across all three floors, dramatically contrasting with the raw industrial aesthetic, were floor-to-ceiling sculptures, some wooden and some clinical-looking, enclosing Baroque figures like scaffolding so that the figures appeared to be works in progress. Everything here smelled of contemporary art. Very ambitious contemporary art.
“Excuse me,” I therefore asked a salesperson, “who is the artist of this installation?”
“Everything is made by our in-house design team,” he replied, not without pride.
He pointed me toward an accompanying text, which revealed that the exhibition, which was not an exhibition, had a theme: “Sacrifice.” This was also the name of the store. Apparently every store had its own.
“The new Hongdae flagship store introduces the story of the Earth God and the sacrifices that are offered to him. Follow the store’s circulation and experience our ‘craftsmanship’ and the Gentle Monster’s way of visualizing eyewear from the 1st floor to 3rd floor.”
Were the quotation marks around “craftsmanship” meant ironically? The modesty of the wording, combined with the confidently ostentatious staging, provoked me.
Nevertheless, I enjoyed the installation, wandered through the rooms and watched people trying everything on and taking photographs of themselves, of the art, or whatever it was, and with the various pairs of glasses. They all looked so happy and grateful.
The thought of gratitude reminded me of Glenn O’Brien, who wrote the Like Art column in Artforum from 1985 to 1990, treating advertising campaigns as art because even then something had become strikingly apparent: “Advertising was like art, and more and more art was like advertising.”
One of O’Brien’s early pieces dealt with a 1984 Nike campaign, the iconic billboards installed around Los Angeles during the Olympic Games. They showed famous American athletes in dramatic, almost superhuman poses and absolutely nothing else. No slogan, no product feature. O’Brien appreciated the fact that the advertising functioned like art in public space, eliminating any sense of pressure to buy. The “ultimate advertising trick” and, at the same time, the source of its art-like quality was that it did not advertise at all. Instead, it gave the people of Los Angeles these magnificent, larger-than-life photographs of their favorite athletes, along with the conversations they inspired.
In this way, the campaign generated gratitude, much like art does. This in turn leads, as a marketing creator recently put it, to people buying products as a way of reciprocating for the experience. The purchase becomes the return gift.
This principle of a gift economy is taken even further in IICOMBINED’s Haus Nowhere concept, which brings all of the company’s brands together under one roof. Yet it is no more merely a shopping center than the stores are merely shops. First and foremost, it is an exhibition space. There is no expectation whatsoever that you will buy anything. If anything, you are expected to take photographs. And the more you feel that you have been given something, the stronger your desire becomes to give something back.
At the beginning of this year, I visited Haus Nowhere in Seongsu, which had opened at the end of the previous year. The building, aptly described as a walk-in science-fiction sculpture, was designed by Kim Chan-joong of THE_SYSTEM LAB.
After exploring the various brand installations across several floors, you eventually arrive at the café, although “café” could hardly be a less appropriate description. It is a space that could have come straight out of Twin Peaks, where tea and dessert creations are served as though you were in a surrealist five-star restaurant. Yet they are entirely affordable, making this the perfect opportunity both to crown the experience AND to give something back, even if only by spending four euros on an extraordinary tea called Mafia, which tastes of whisky and cigars.
In general, the products from Gentle Monster, Tamburins and the other brands also tend to be budget-friendly, or at least they do not occupy the luxury segment. Eyewear is, after all, one of the highest-margin product categories, and from that perspective the stores are essentially a marketing budget.
You descend through the floors again in an elevator that looks like a garage and blasts loud techno music as soon as its door closes. This immediately reminded me of an Anne Imhof exhibition I had seen several years earlier at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Meanwhile, an elevator attendant, perhaps an actress, stares at you impassively.
At the exit, which is also the entrance, opposite a monstrous robot sculpture, hangs Miriam Cahn’s painting O.T., 30.06.2013 (2025). Its characteristically impasto-painted, fiery red branches reaching upward against a turquoise-green background are surprisingly moving amid the Brutalist architecture and kinetic installations.
What happened on June 30, 2013? I quickly google it. Massive nationwide protests against then-President Mohamed Morsi took place in Egypt. On the same day, 19 elite firefighters died fighting Arizona’s Yarnell Hill Fire, the deadliest tragedy for US firefighters since September 11. Croatia joined the European Union that day.
It is certainly possible that Cahn was referring to the mass uprising in Egypt and the impending fall of the Morsi government. It must have been heavily reported, and many of her works have this kind of direct relationship to geopolitical events. But on the other hand, with so many years’ delay?
I am slightly surprised to suddenly find an artwork label here. I open the Papago app to translate the Korean text. “O.T., 30.06.2013 symbolizes vitality, passion and a willingness to sacrifice. It explores the nature and emotions of the human being. With its powerful presence, it breathes life into the space and lends it aesthetic and philosophical depth.”
Exactly!
While Miriam Cahn was given a label, everything else, without any indication whatsoever of authorship, apparently came from the in-house design team.
Since my first visit, whenever I have been in South Korea or China, I have made a point of visiting every store belonging to an IICOMBINED brand. One reason is that they are constantly redesigned to coincide with new “stories” and collaborations. Gentle Monster generally changes the thematic worlds of its stores every two to four months.
Much like K-pop creates a new concept for each album, every new story creates its own fictional universe, a lore drop waiting to be documented and interpreted. Retail design is not advertising in the narrow sense. But in the age of social media, it essentially is, since “Instagrammability” and “TikTokability” matter more and more.
Gentle Monster does not merely provide photogenic environments. It provides narratives that can be further processed through reaction videos and comment sections. The stores therefore do not create occasions to buy. They create occasions for content.
But that still does not explain the aesthetic. A sea of flowers would have been photogenic too. Why a sacrificed Atlas? Why a horse with a twitching tail? Why does everything have to look like contemporary art?
And why this stubborn refusal of authorship?
It is more difficult than one might think to find out who is behind the mysterious in-house design team. No names, no signatures, no studio credits, only the collective “our.” One could interpret this simply as corporate logic: the company retains the rights, and the brand remains the only star.
But I believe the refusal itself contains the true conceptual act.
My theory is that the horse is an inverse readymade. Duchamp brought the mass-produced object into the museum and transformed it into art through signature and context. The location and the name did all the work. IICOMBINED performs precisely the opposite maneuver. It brings art into the store and removes the signature.
In 1969, Jannis Kounellis had twelve live horses tethered to the walls of Rome’s Galleria L’Attico. They stood there for several days, breathing, eating, smelling like horses and like what horses leave behind, before they were taken away again. As documentation, Kounellis authorized a black-and-white photograph of the installation.
The fact that the whole thing was art rather than a stable was guaranteed by the location and, of course, by the artist’s name.
At Tamburins, every one of these aspects was reversed. There is only a single horse. It is artificial rather than alive, indeed a scentless animal in a store devoted specifically to fragrance. It is permanently installed rather than removed after a few days. Instead of being preserved in one authorized photograph, it is captured in thousands of selfies every day.
And there is nobody whose name guarantees what it is.
That is precisely why it remains suspended. An artist’s name would answer the question “Is this art?” The horse would then be a sculpture by XY, something that could be categorized, compared and eventually filed away. A price tag would settle the question just as effectively, only in the opposite direction.
But the refusal of authorship keeps the object permanently suspended between artwork and commodity. It manufactures precisely that liminal space of non-understanding that I described at the beginning as a criterion for good art. Except that here it is not a by-product of an artistic risk. It is the underlying design principle.
And yet “our in-house design team” by no means signifies the absence of an author. After more extensive research, one does come across a few names, for example Woosuk Choi, whose Instagram bio says “Head of Haus Nowhere.” Incidentally, he has only around 2,500 followers and shares architectural sketches by Tatlin and installation views of Miriam Cahn. Ha!
Rather, it is a concept of authorship that functions without individual geniuses, biographies or artwork labels. IICOMBINED operates more like a premodern workshop, where presumably nobody asked who exactly was responsible for this particular bizarre gargoyle, let alone expected anyone to sign it.
Like a cathedral with countless small gargoyles, a Gentle Monster store, with its countless large objects resembling contemporary artworks, only truly comes into its own when it is visited and brought to life. Through prayer and through photography.
The gift IICOMBINED gives its customers, or visitors, is therefore not merely the experience of looking. It is also the experience of becoming part of the creative process. Modesty on the part of authorship leads here to greater confidence on the part of recipients and fans. They are the ones who bring the respective lore, the fictional universe, to life.
Perhaps that is the company’s real innovation, and perhaps it is also the reason why my own non-understanding here, unlike in front of many works of art, never entirely lets go of me. IICOMBINED has made the liminal space productive.
What in art is a promise, that understanding will eventually arrive and that one will gradually grow into it, is made permanent here. Perhaps because fulfilling that promise would be bad for business.
In any case, the liminal space here is an investment intended to pay off, and I am diligently helping it do so.
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