All images: “White Elephant (Privately Soft)” by Jimenez Lai via

In his decadent fin de siècle novel, Against Nature, the writer Joris-Karl Huysmans describes, with great fetish and imagination, the home of his fatally eccentric protagonist Des Esseintes, who wastes away his days in a decaying estate just outside of Paris. Of particular interest is the curious construction of the house’s dining room, which is encapsulated in a small room inserted into the study. Sealed off by a “padded corridor” from the rest of the room, the vaulted chamber “resembled the cabin of a ship…[and] like those Japanese boxes which fit into each other…” Porthole windows on both sides of the room, one which could be covered up or opened to circulate air, while the other faced the window in the outer wall to let in light. Wedged in this in-between space was a long aquarium of mechanical fish, into which Des Esseintes poured drops of colored liquids, dyeing the water (and light) with “tones similar to those of rivers which reflect the color of the sky, the intensity of the sun, the menace of the rain. . . When he did this, he imagined himself in a brig, between decks.”

Jimenez Lai’s project “White Elephant (Privately Soft)” is a building-within-a-building that similarly captures the feeling of inhabiting the middle-spaces that Huysmans so dexterously renders. The 10′ by 10′ by 10′ object, which falls “somewhere between a super-furniture and a small house,” can be flipped along its multifaceted body to create new spatial orientations. Continue.

Interestingly, Lai’s piece acts as a portable room, one which, through all its possible derivations, simultaneously occludes and multiplies the space of the room it occupies. While Des Esseintes’ dining cell was fixed to the floor and walls, more or less reliant on external devices to modulate its constituent environment, the “White Elephant” intercepts the flow of space, swallows it, and regurgitates it in fractured form. In the artist’s own words, the mico-building/macro-furniture “obstructs the continuity of interior spaces like an elephant in a room.”

While its outer shell is hard and impenetrable, the object’s inner recesses are soft, lined with cow-hide so as to foster a cozy place to sit or rest. Here, the user’s bed or sofa is figuratively and physically extended in all directions, engulfing them in a cavernous pocket of padded walls. If lit from the inside, as Geoff Manuagh suggests, the object achieve a relative spatial autonomy that somewhat “invalidate[s] the walls around it.” Archinect has more photos which illustrate how the piece is tumbled and turned.