“Lean On” presented by Huis Saai during Dutch Design Week 17-25 Oktober

Lean On

Lean On

‘Lean On’ is the first issue of Huis Saai, exploring the relationship between everyday repetitive actions and the home through magazine and space. Each issue focuses on a single everyday action, collecting diverse stories shaped by it. Selected stories from the magazine are translated into a spatial experience for Dutch Design Week 2026, composed of furniture and objects by international designers.

The shape of life

During Dutch Design Week, an Art space will be reconfigured several times based on selected stories from the ‘Lean On’ magazine. The lighting, chairs, and objects contributed by participating designers will shift in position, arrangement, relationship, and composition throughout the week, revealing different forms of everyday life connected to ‘Lean On — The Shape of Life’. Each story creates a new scene within the space, changing the relationships between furniture and objects and shaping a different ‘The Shape of Life’.

What makes a home?

The exhibition will take place at Art Space Auto Vitesse, located slightly outside the centre of Eindhoven and surrounded by residential houses. Taking inspiration from its surroundings, we transform the gallery into a domestic space by translating real experiences and everyday stories collected through the magazine into the exhibition space.
Rather than presenting objects as static works, the exhibition evokes how they might appear and function in everyday life. Small, personal stories from different individuals come together through furniture, objects, and spatial arrangements, creating connections between different ways of living within a shared interior.

About Huis saai

Huis Saai is a design collective of four designers based in Eindhoven

Magazine& Graphic designer Ayari Nakamura

Funding & Communications Moe Kim

Logistics & Productions Kee Hyun Ahn

Installation & Production Jun Hyoung Kim

◊

This is the second time ArtSpace AutoVitesse participates in the Dutch Design Week. This year we are the guesthouse for the design collective Huis Saai, a group of four designers, master students at the Design Academy, who as a collaborating group came up with a specific plan in which collaboration, sharing and influencing are thematised and to be presented at the ArtSpace AutoVitesse. Also, on the level of the specifics of the space itself, their concept is directed towards collaboration, sharing and influencing — in this case between art, architecture and design.
The ArtSpace is the presentation spot of the foundation HuisHenkVisch, which harbours a collection of artworks from the founder artist Henk Visch, who over the last 40 years collected artworks from colleagues living and working in Europe and Asia. The concept of the foundation is to present artworks in relation to each other, taking into account the different contexts, settings and cultural differences that exist in time and space. No artwork is isolated in itself, but is presented as part of a bigger scheme of events, in which it finds, as if by accident, a place to fit. The act of collecting, resulting in a collection, becomes a possibility to create a collective memory for society to cultivate.
Regarding the concept of the foundation and the praxis of the ArtSpace, the proposed project ‘Lean on’ of the designer collective Huis Saai becomes an interesting elaboration on the theme of collecting memories for cultivating a collective awareness. As our Western society has developed a strong sense of individuality and independence, the art world has ever more difficulty functioning on the level of collective awareness and consciousness — a level on which its engagement with society depends.
The project ‘Lean on’ elaborates on touch, the direct physical effects of contact with objects. The objects invite, so to speak, to touch, to lean on, to feel: opening up to the environment in order to acknowledge finally our dependence on what surrounds us. And if in our defensive world we have lost this sense to ‘lean on’ others, because of a lack of security, shame, shyness or even fear, let the objects go first and teach us to ‘lean on’. In the centre of the ArtSpace you will find a table with the soft imprints of the inside of your hands as a trace of the touch as we know it from our physical memory.
We added 10 artworks to the presentation ‘Lean on’ by 7 different artists from different backgrounds: the American artist Robin Winters with a drawing and a sculpture of Elvis; the Greek-Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico with a late graphic work from his recurrent theme, the Italian Piazza at noon; the Dutch artist Henk Peeters, father of the Dutch Zero Movement; Ed Templeton with a photograph of his 2 nieces, members of his family with whom he travelled for years during his nomadic skateboarding life; the Dutch artist Jos van der Sommen with an artist portrait situated in a Japanese hotel room; Mari Reynders who shows the hand of the craftsman and the Dutch artist Henk Visch with two chairs from a series of furniture titled Gletsjer and a graphic work titled ‘Remote Control’

Huis Saai is a design collective of four designers based in Eindhoven

Magazine& Graphic designer Ayari Nakamura

Funding & Communications Moe Kim

Logistics & Productions Kee Hyun Ahn

Installation & Production Jun Hyoung Kim