Artist Note

Resonant Layers (2025) is an extension of Succession, Yet Creation (2023), in which Kim projected a digitally reinterpreted video onto a translucent fabric installed in front of a Najeon lacquerware cabinet located in his grandmother’s home. By embedding the video within the intimate, historically charged domestic space of the lacquerware—a symbolic artifact of Korea’s urban middle-class identity from the 1960s to 1980s—the work constructs a multilayered spatial composition in which digital temporality and historical materiality converge and resonate. At the heart of this work lies the transformation of one of the most iconic and culturally embedded patterns in Korean lacquerware: the pine tree. A traditional motif symbolizing longevity, integrity, and resilience, the pine tree is extracted from the cabinet’s surface, digitized, and reconfigured into fluid, abstract visual patterns. Through this process, Kim reimagines the symbolic depth of the motif and expands its aesthetic presence through contemporary media. These pine patterns, along with ridgeline motifs, are translated into a digital visual language that floats across layers of fabric and light—suspended between dimensions, echoing tradition while moving forward.

This work deepens the exploration of Walter Benjamin’s theory from The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, which argues that technological replication liberates artworks from their ritualistic “aura” and fixed historical authority. Resonant Layers embraces this liberation not as a loss, but as a mode of recontextualization: a way to transform cultural artifacts into dynamic, living subjects within the digital present. Once a vibrant emblem of postwar prosperity and modern aspiration, the mother-of-pearl cabinet now exists on the periphery of cultural memory. Through projection mapping onto semi-transparent textile, the work constructs a visual veil—one through which time refracts and the boundaries between material and immaterial, static and moving, tradition and innovation are blurred. Where Succession, Yet Creation emphasized the revival of Korean craft through themes of “Multiple, Repetition, and Seriality,” Resonant Layers shifts focus to temporal and spatial superimposition. By weaving together video projection, inherited object, and translucent material, the work invites viewers into a layered dialogue between digital media and inherited tradition. The lacquerware cabinet is no longer merely a relic of the past, but a lens through which we might imagine the afterlives of cultural objects—and the evolving possibilities of tradition in the digital age.