From Monday 18 April through Sunday 24 April 2011, the second floor of AO Building in Kita-Aoyama hosted Flux Chair Gallery — a week-long popup exhibition celebrating the Japanese launch of the Flux chair, a fold-flat seat that had already gone viral online before a single unit reached retail shelves. Shibuya Channel covered the opening as a design-and-retail crossover story: a Dutch industrial product arriving in Tokyo with a gallery layer on top, rather than a simple shop display.
Dates, prices, and venue details reflect April 2011 only.
What was opening in Aoyama
The event marked the first Japanese landing of Flux chair, sold as a popup chair you could carry, store, and deploy without treating furniture like freight. AO Building — a familiar stop on the Omotesando–Aoyama axis — gave the brand a short, high-visibility window: seven days, free entry, and a floor devoted to both the product and reinterpretations of it.
For readers who tracked Shibuya Channel for street-level trend spotting, the Aoyama venue was a deliberate choice. Design launches in this corridor often sat one train stop from Shibuya but spoke to the same audience that followed furniture blogs, concept stores, and limited-run collaborations.
The chair behind the gallery
Flux chair came out of the Netherlands under industrial designers Douwe Jacobs and Tom Schouten. Their founding concept was blunt and memorable: fit seventy-seven chairs inside one meter of space. That is not marketing poetry — it describes a flat-pack sheet that pops into a rigid seat and folds back down again.
Coverage emphasized three practical wins alongside the visual novelty:
- Portability — easy to carry, fold, and stash when not in use
- Strength — polypropylene construction rated to support up to 160 kg
- Versatility — suitable for outdoor patios, gardens, and indoor rooms without feeling like temporary camping gear
Material choice mattered to the pitch as well. Flux chair is built from PP (polypropylene), framed as a twenty-first-century product decision: shorter recycling paths and a single-material body that could survive real-world weight and weather.
By April 2011 the popup assembly video had already circulated widely on Twitter, YouTube, and design blogs — the kind of shareable clip that sells a chair before customers touch the hinge. Coverage linked to the official clip at fluxchairs.com/video.
Flux × creator collaborations
The gallery half of the week was not a static showroom. Organizers lined the space with collaboration pieces from Japanese creators and studios, each treating the chair surface as a canvas. The announced roster included:
- Oyakata (Punk Drunkers)
- Hi-dutch
- Koji Toyoda
- aikohno
- PROT TYPE (Milok)
- Kyoko Sakamoto
- Yassutaka Saito
- plus additional participants listed as “and others” in the source
That mix — streetwear-adjacent labels, illustrators, and product designers — matched how Tokyo was consuming European design objects in the early 2010s: not as museum pieces, but as platforms for local graphic identity.
Event facts (April 2011)
- Event: Flux Chair Gallery (Flux chair Japan launch popup)
- Dates: 18–24 April 2011 (Mon–Sun)
- Venue: AO Building 2F, 3-11-7 Kita-Aoyama, Minato-ku, Tokyo
- Hours: 11:00–18:00
- Admission: free
- Product inquiries: 03-5368-1800
- Flux chair price: ¥15,750 (as listed at publication)
How it connects to Shibuya’s design orbit
Aoyama and Omotesando sit on the same evening-out graph as Shibuya — many readers would have changed trains at Shibuya Station and walked or rode one stop west for openings like this. The Flux chair story also rhymes with later popup retail waves in the ward: foreign objects tested in gallery format, then scaled if the clip and the floor traffic justify it.
If you want a live read on crowd density around the scramble before heading to an Aoyama opening, the Shibuya Crossing live camera still frames the basin where those design-curious crowds gather — even when the event itself is one neighborhood over.
Travelers stacking Shibuya culture stops with a longer outing can compare options in best day trip from Tokyo.
Historical note
Flux Chair Gallery was a timed popup. AO Building tenants, Flux chair distribution, and creator links have changed in the years since. Treat details above as April 2011 only, not a current shopping guide.
