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HONMI

New York
Hong Kong
Seoul

office@honmi.works
Instagram

About

Design Practice

We operate across art, architecture, and cultural programming. Rather than adhering to conventional client-service frameworks, the studio approaches design as a form of facilitation—cultivating collaborations between creative practitioners, institutions, and local communities.

Drawing inspiration from Oppositions, the influential journal that shaped postmodern architectural discourse, we established POSITIONS, an ephemeral retail–exhibition platform that responds to the fragmented ecologies of contemporary retail. Reimagining the storefront as a cultural infrastructure, POSITIONS transforms commercial space into a site for exchange—connecting emerging designers with the public through exhibitions, performances, and gatherings.

Our work spans furniture, retails, pavilions, and architecture. Through bold chromatic palettes and unconventional material pairings, we construct charged spatial atmospheres that foreground the emotional, social, and political dimensions embedded within the built environment.

Art Practice

Alongside our design work, we examine geographical abstraction and cultural disappearance shaped by modern systems of governance. We position precarity and stability not as opposites, but as interdependent forces through which cultural identities are continually negotiated and reconfigured.

Specifically, our research traces the structural transformation of contemporary East Asian rituals—from Hong Kong’s Jiao (醮) festivals to South Korea’s funerary culture—investigating how belief systems persist, adapt, and reassemble within conditions of accelerated urbanization and technocracy. Rather than treating these practices as static heritage, we approach them as living infrastructures through which communities negotiate memory, loss, and collective continuity.

Grounded in participatory engagements, we employ spatial installations, performative environments, and digital media to create formal tensions and reveal how modernity continuously restructures local typologies while simultaneously producing new conditions for cultural memory to endure.

HON

Bryan Honting Wong is from Hong Kong. His work engages the notion of hauntology within postcolonial contexts, examining how cultural memory and precarity shape the everyday urban politics of global cities such as Hong Kong and Seoul. Through this lens, he investigates the shifting exchanges between cultural and economic value, considering design as a medium through which spaces of repair, reflection, and collective imagination can emerge.

He received a Master of Science in Architectural Studies (SMArchS) from the MIT School of Architecture and Planning, and holds a Bachelor of Arts in Landscape Studies (BALS) from the University of Hong Kong.

MI

Namhi Kwun is from Seoul. Her work investigates the productive tensions between the mundane and the extraordinary, as well as the temporal interplay of past and future conditions within the built environment. Her design approach combines formal gestures with unconventional material strategies, layering traditional and contemporary conditions to explore the ways architecture mediate cultural memory and the perception of space.

She received a Master of Science in Architectural Studies (SMArchS) and a Master in City Planning (MCP) from the MIT School of Architecture and Planning, and holds a Bachelor of Architecture (BArch) from the California College of the Arts.

Collaborators

Anemonia
Bungee Space
City of Boston
City of Seoul
Christian Stone
Domino Architecture Bookshop
Fey Fey Worldwide
Hong Kong Community Radio
Hypebeast
LeBlancStudios
MIT Architecture
MIT Center for the Arts

Nilmance (N-0)
Office H
Opus0012
Panic Room
Para Site
Salomon
Saint Sintra
Studio Wenjüe Lu
Symmetrical Society
Verconiik
Yat Pit
Yueqiqi

Recognitions and Publications

Recognitions

Creators for Tomorrow, HKAC, 2026
Art Grant, Centers for the Arts, MIT, 2024
Harold and Arlene Schnitzer Prize, MIT, 2024
Art Incubator Fellowship, MIT, 2024
Central Massachusetts Scholarship, AIA, 2023
Julien Bienart Award for Urbanism, MIT, 2023

Publications

Issue 14, Cornell Journel of Architecture, 2026
Radically More Human, Seoul Biennale, 2026
Vol. 8, Paprika Magazine, Yale Architecture, 2026
Issue 14, PLAT Journal, Rice Architecture, 2026
Seoul Children Museum, 2026
Gaudi Foundation, 2026
Interview Series, KooZArch Magazine, 2024
Out of Frame Journal, MIT Architecture, 2023
Vol. 10, LAF Journal, Beijing University, 2022

HONMI is a design studio based between New York, Hong Kong, and Seoul, working across art, architecture and culture to create spaces of exchange. Design as cultural facilitation.