Gyuhan Lee 2026 Happy Meal Paper Bag Lighting 06 | Side Gallery

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GYUHAN LEE

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Happy Meal Paper Bag Lighting 06
Manufactured by Gyuhan Lee
Korea, 2026
1998 Happy Meal paper bag, Hanji, steel, electrical components

Measurements
23 × 23 × 34h cm
9,1 × 9,1 × 13,4h in

Edition
Edition of 10 + 1 AP

About
Gyuhan Lee’s work explores the intersection of consumer culture, material reuse, and traditional Korean craftsmanship. Working with discarded and found packaging from globally recognized brands, Lee transforms ephemeral, mass-produced materials into carefully constructed furniture and lighting pieces.
Happy Meal Paper Bag Lighting 06 incorporates a McDonald’s Happy Meal paper bag dating from 1998, preserving its distinctive illustrations, typography, and graphic identity within a new functional object. Combined with traditional Korean Hanji paper, steel, and electrical components, the original packaging becomes a translucent architectural surface through which light reveals and recontextualizes its imagery.
Through a process rooted in manual making and material experimentation, Lee removes familiar packaging from its original commercial context and gives it a new permanence. The juxtaposition of an industrially printed, disposable object with Hanji and handcraft establishes a dialogue between global consumer culture and Korean material tradition.
Rather than concealing the material’s previous life, Lee allows its visual and cultural traces to remain central to the work. The resulting lamp transforms an everyday object associated with consumption and disposability into a collectible design piece, inviting a reconsideration of value, memory, sustainability, and craftsmanship.

Designer image

Gyuhan Lee (1996, Seoul) began his formation at Kaywon University of Art and Design, where he specialised in Living Design, questioning the role of the waste that everyday actions carry with them, a question that will give rise to interesting design proposals, where he has forged a personal line.

His first series "On My Seat" transformed Nike boxes into pieces of furniture, intermingling mass production, the waste of the product of which he was a consumer, in pieces close to craftsmanship, where accumulation gave rise to new forms of furniture, putting comfort, utility and consumism in the spotlight. The design of the new pieces was also questioned from an aesthetic point of view, rethinking dynamism through the use of the symbol, as a pattern that would end up setting a rhythm, both chromatically and formally, when intertwined in the final design.

This can be seen again in the design of lamps, which were recognised with the 2015 Red Dot Design Award. His work has been featured in relevant design media such as Wallpaper Magazine and Design Milk.

In the series ; his purpose was to create light sculptures through a recycling process, in which Hanji paper, a traditional Korean paper, would create different surfaces in which the dynamism of the icon and its use would be detached from the unique meaning implicit in the logo, creating patterns of new meanings.
Now this collection and investigation of the role of the designer, craftsman and consumism, expands in Side Gallery, with the production of exclusive lamps, as part of the group exhibition "Global Tools".

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