Self Discovery

Designer Kim Mupangilai unearths her roots in a bold foray into furniture

- HANNAH MARTIN

They're meant to look like they're dancing," says Kim Mupangilaï, reflecting on the eight works in her inaugural solo show at Manhattan's Superhouse gallery this past summer. Unveiled in a vitrine-like space on the second floor of a Chinatown mall, her furnishings do have an uncanny, anthropomorphic energy. A sinuous bench wears a swingy, banana-fiber skirt; an armoire seems to stomp its heeled foot; and a groovy floor lamp sports a shade modeled after a precolonial Congolese hairstyle. Their surreal silhouettes might recall the work of Antoni Gaudí, Philippe Hiquily, or Joan Miró, made at a time when many creatives mined colonial Africa for inspiration. But Mupangilaï's pieces, which she describes as "cross-cultural self-portraits," chart new territory, mixing the