Hans J. Wegner is the most innovative and prolific of all Danish furniture designers. The son of a shoe-maker in southern Jutland, he finished his formal training as a cabinetmaker with master cabinetmaker Stahlberg in 1930 before starting at the Teknologisk Institut in Copenhagen. He soon moved to the School of Arts and Crafts in the Danish capital where he became architect in 1938, and started teaching in 1946. 

In 1940 he joined Arne Jacobsen and Erik Møller in Arhus, to design the furniture for the new Arhus city hall and soon started to work with Johannes Hansen, showing his first furniture in the famous Hansen store on Bredgade 65 in 1941. Johannes Hansen was more than twice as old as the 26 year old Wegner but the unique collaboration between the two became the undisputed backbone of Danish furniture design and the main reason for its world wide recognition in the 1950s and 1960s. 

In 1943 he started his own design office in Gentofte. A year later, for Johannes Hansen, he began a series of at least 9 'Chinese' chairs, inspired by portraits of Danish merchants sitting in Ming chairs. 

A version of the ‘Chinese’ chair produced by Carl Hansen & Søn in Odense became the most successful of all Wegner chairs. The most famous version is the one used by Kennedy and Nixon in their CBS TV debate of 1960.

The friendship between Wegner and the celebrated Danish furniture designer Børge Mogensen, produced a child's chair and table that was still in production when the child it was designed for, Børge's son, was over 50 years old.

The Copenhagen Museum of Art and Industry acquired the first Wegner chair in 1942. He received almost all major honors given to designers, from the Lunning prize and the grand prix of the Milan Triennale both in 1954, to the Prince Eugen medal in Sweden and the Danish Eckersberg medal. In 1959 he was made honorary Royal designer for industry by the Royal Society of Arts in London. His furniture is part of all major design museum collections in the world such as the Museum of Modern Art in N.Y. and the Die Neue Samlung in Munich.