foundation annual report 2009–10 - National Gallery of Australia

Khai Liew
born Malaysia 1952
to Australia 1971
Kokoso cabinet 2010
wood (blackbean)
120 x 120 x 54 cm
gift of Susan Armitage, 2010
Khai Liew was self-taught as a designer, establishing his own
business in Adelaide in 1997 for the design of custom-made
furniture and interior design, while retailing Australian colonial,
Asian and Scandinavian furniture. Liew brings a particular
cultural reading to his practice, illustrating the diversity of style
that characterises current design in Australia.
The design of this cabinet is based on Liew’s research into
late nineteenth-century English decorative styles such as the
elevated cabinets of Charles Ashbee and Ernest Gimson. The
form of this work also references French decorative and Danish
Modernist design of the 1920s and 1940s, but its precise and
refined detailing draws inspiration from the tradition of fifteenthcentury
Flemish and English linenfold relief carving popularised
in the British Tudor revival styles of the nineteenth century.
Liew has abstracted such historicism and visual literalness into
an origami-like object that reveals little of its content. Precise
bevelled edges allow an apparently seamless flow of the lightly
attenuated relief decoration that wraps around the cabinet’s
two-door structure.
Such angular design elements are carried through into Liew’s
contract furniture, such as the suite of public seating recently
commissioned by the National Gallery
of Australia for its public spaces.
26 national gallery of australia FOUNDATION