The most telling object at Mike Han’s MONOCHROME exhibition was not for sale, at least not in the usual way. The black 2016 Hermès Birkin 30, its surface covered in the Korean American artist’s sweeping silver character linework, went to auction on Charitybuzz with every net dollar earmarked for the Dynami Foundation, a Michigan nonprofit funding research, education and patient support for breast cancer. Bidding has already reached $24,000, and the auction closes October 16 during Uncork for a Cure, the foundation’s signature fundraiser at M1 Concourse in Pontiac.
“The purpose of living well isn’t to serve yourself; it’s to serve others,” Han says. The cause is not abstract for him. His grandmother, diagnosed in Korea, was warned that if her cancer returned she could not be treated again, so she emigrated to access care; his mother has beaten breast cancer twice. Dynami’s focus on invasive lobular carcinoma, the second most common breast cancer subtype and among the most underfunded, is what drew him in.
MONOCHROME, a one-night show at Vander Detroit during the city’s Month of Design, was built as an argument about value staged across three mediums. There were CNC-carved plywood pieces. There was a 2006 Porsche Boxster. And there was the bag, each surface worked over with what Han calls “character linework,” calligraphic abstractions of the figure rooted in his Korean heritage and in graffiti. “For me value is a spectrum,” he says. “But everyone weighs value differently. These judgements are subjective and deeply affected by our finances, environment, and upbringing.”
The Porsche, his everyday car, carried the work from Los Angeles to Detroit and doubled as an exhibit: metallic paint protected under PPF, then wrapped in matte vinyl hand-cut directly on the body. “[It] became an art object whose purpose was to facilitate the creation of art that served a purpose. The journey from LA to Detroit, to create and complete this work makes the vehicle priceless in my eyes,” he says. He finished the car in Detroit, live-painting its interior with paint manufactured in the city, a deliberate homecoming. Han lives in Santa Monica, but his family arrived from Korea in the 1970s knowing exactly one person in America, who lived in Detroit. “They didn’t really choose Detroit; they were drawn here,” he says. The city’s motto, “We hope for better things; it shall rise from the ashes,” has stayed with him, as has what he calls its “grit and tenacity.”
If the car tested sentimental value, the plywood tested market value in its rawest form. Han showed 88 carved pieces and let buyers name their own prices, a live experiment in how collectors price their connection to a work. Every piece sold, raising more than $11,000 for Do Good Work, a Detroit nonprofit helping creatives build sustainable careers through ownership models for studio space.
The Birkin occupied the far end of the spectrum. “It’s a luxury icon, and in my eyes, it represents the highest end of the value spectrum,” Han says, though he notes that “handbags feel personal.” He painted it in Alpha 6 metallic silver, another Detroit-made material. “This was an unauthorized collaboration between the master at Hermès who built the bag in 2016 and an artist who had no permission to alter the original design,” he says. The intent, he insists, was never to subvert the object but to put its value to work: “I decided to create art with the intention of leveraging its value for something I care about.”
What MONOCHROME asked its audience to sit with was the mindfulness of the objects they surround themselves with, luxury or plywood, and what those objects are actually for. Han’s own work is collected at thehouseofhan.com, and the Birkin auction runs through Charitybuzz.
