Had you visited Sora Kim's 2004 exhibition 'Elephant Island' you would have entered into a world composed of a series of alluring but mystifying constructions and aggregations of things.¹

In the middle of a half-moon-shaped gallery lay a large white object consisting of a stack of ten progressively smaller platforms, all distinctly malformed circles resembling the diagrams of small islands or atolls on a map. On the top of this was a little yellow popcorn machine regularly spitting out snacks for un-wary visitors to the exhibition. Around this structure stood several irregular shaped, roundish columns built out of Styrofoam and plywood, which conjured up a little forest of dripstones and functioned as bookshelves. In the midst of all this, lit by a mishmash of retro-looking chandeliers, stood a table and some chairs. The walls and existing round columns in the space were painted in bands of deep hues - purple, lavender, mint green and so on. What was the organising concept or theme? The titles of the various parts - Volcano, Library and Paging - at first seemed to offer few clues.

All in all, this room-sized installation, with its natural forms and eclectic design vocabularies, created an immediately inviting, eye-catching environment - one that would not look out of place in a self-consciously outrageous photo-spread that you might find in Wallpaper* magazine. That this environment creatively seemed to appropriate some language of contemporary design, and that it encouraged various kinds of social behaviour from gallery visitors, is not something which is inherently interesting; these are by now familiar concepts, perhaps even debased clichés. What is interesting about 'Elephant Island' is the way in which