The Strangest Man In Ikea


Taeyoon Choi isn’t at this Ikea, the second largest store location in the world, to buy a coffee table. He’s not there for delicious meatballs and lingonberry sauce, either. He’s in Ikea to create crazy-weird experimental noise machines.

The project, entitled Hacking Ikea, puts Choi in a variety of settings within the supremely sterile furniture compound. There he is, making partially-consumed pastries spin around in the cafeteria. Now he’s making the forks dance in a display kitchen. Why is he doing this? To make people uncomfortable, like any good artist: “it is the uselessness and its evident impossibility that grants power as an artistic resistance,” Choi says. In human speak, that’s weirding you out. And in Ikea, a place that’s completely devoid of anything abnormal, maybe that’s just what we need! It might prevent that holy shit I’ve been looking at bookshelves for over an hour, there are no windows in here, I feel ants crawling behind my eye sockets sensation. [Taeyoon Choi via Creators Project]