Kumkum Fernando’s 27th Century Cabinet: When Sculpture Becomes Furniture

Kumkum Fernando debuts his first furniture piece, the 27th Century Collector’s Cabinet, a limited-edition work of art that blends mythology, geometry, and space-age design, meticulously handmade in Saigon.

From Robots to Furniture, A Mythic Continuum of Kumkum Fernando

For years, Kumkum Fernando’s sculptural figures have inhabited a mythological universe of robots, temples, and dreamlike memories.

Kumkum Fernando – Close-up of the 27th Century Collector’s Cabinet, showing brass legs and hand opening a lacquered drawer with psychedelic pattern, merging design and interactive art. — **Kumkum Fernando**’s *27th Century Collector’s Cabinet* is alive in its details: brass feet ground the piece with a soft sheen, while each lacquered drawer face becomes a miniature artwork, pulled open like a secret. The cabinet invites not just looking, but touching, transforming furniture into ritual. Image Courtesy of the artist

Now, the artist turns to furniture, though “furniture” feels almost too functional a word for what he has made.

The 27th Century Collector’s Cabinet is less a cabinet than a vessel: part shrine, part time machine, part psychedelic relic from a parallel future.

Kumkum Fernando – Front view of the 27th Century Collector’s Cabinet, showing full grid of colorful geometric symbols inspired by temple iconography, psychedelic art, and futuristic design. — **Kumkum Fernando**’s *27th Century Collector’s Cabinet* stands like a sculptural monolith, its grid of psychedelic symbols recalling temples, textiles, and futuristic design codes. Each square becomes a world in itself, together forming a cabinet that blurs art, mythology, and furniture. Image courtesy of the artist

The 27th Century Cabinet

Taking its cue from the traditional Chinese medicine chest, Fernando reimagines a form once used for sacred remedies as an object of speculative design.

Kumkum Fernando – Angled view of the 27th Century Collector’s Cabinet, featuring colorful geometric patterns, lacquered finish, and brass details, merging functional furniture with futuristic mythology. — **Kumkum Fernando**’s *27th Century Collector’s Cabinet* seen in angled view: a constellation of geometric symbols, lacquered surfaces, and brass details transforms the familiar cabinet into a sculptural relic of myth and futurism. The work stands as both storage and story, functional object and cosmic artifact. Image Courtesy of the artist

Built by hand in Saigon, the cabinet combines an engineered wood core with a meticulous multi-layer lacquer finish.

Brass legs and detailing anchor the piece in the material world, while high-gloss pigment overlays shimmer like portals into another dimension.

**Kumkum Fernando**’s *27th Century Collector’s Cabinet* in close-up: a hypnotic drawer front of concentric red and blue squares pulses with psychedelic energy. Each handle is not just a functional element but a point of entry into the artist’s mythic universe, where furniture becomes a cosmic code. Image courtesy of the artist

The cabinet belongs to his new series The Birth of the Cosmos, a body of collectible functional works that continue his exploration of mythic geometry, psychedelic ritual, and space-age design.

Editioned at just 27, each cabinet comes with a certificate of authenticity, underscoring its dual identity as both artwork and heirloom.

Kumkum Fernando – 27th Century Collector’s Cabinet alongside custom wooden shipping crate marked “Handmade in Saigon,” limited edition lacquered furniture artwork blending art, mythology, and futuristic design. — **Kumkum Fernando**’s *27th Century Collector’s Cabinet* pictured with its custom crate. Handmade in Saigon, the work arrives as both furniture and sculpture, a collectible object designed for transport across time and space, echoing myth, ritual, and futuristic design codes. Image courtesy of the artist

Themes and Continuities

Fernando’s leap into furniture is not a departure but an expansion. His robot-like figures, steeped in temple iconography and Neo-Tantric forms, always hinted at architecture and ritual.

Kumkum Fernando – Detail of multiple small open drawers in the 27th Century Collector’s Cabinet, black-and-white fronts with yellow circles and brass handles, merging geometry with functional design. — **Kumkum Fernando**’s *27th Century Collector’s Cabinet* reveals a series of small drawers, each front marked with bold black-and-white symbols punctuated by yellow circles. Function meets visual rhythm, as everyday storage becomes a pattern of geometry, color, and ritual. Image courtesy of the artist

Here, those worlds become tactile: a place to store, to hide, to remember. The 27th Century Cabinet echoes both the psychedelic visions of the 1960s and the spiritual architectures of Asia, but it refuses nostalgia. Instead, it proposes furniture as a medium for mythology.

Kumkum Fernando – Detail with open drawers of the 27th Century Collector’s Cabinet, lacquered surfaces with psychedelic patterns and brass handles, blending art, mythology, and functional design. — **Kumkum Fernando**’s *27th Century Collector’s Cabinet* reveals its inner mechanics: drawers slide open to expose vibrant fronts, each inscribed with futuristic symbols and anchored by polished brass handles. A cabinet becomes more than storage, it becomes a ritual of discovery. Image courtesy of the artist

A Curatorial Reflection

Why does this work matter now? Because it dissolves the old division between art and design. Fernando’s cabinet is functional, yes, but it functions most of all as an encounter, between the sacred and the everyday, between myth and domestic space.

It reminds us that furniture can be more than comfort: it can be narrative, cosmos, ritual.