ARTIST NOTE

Succession, Yet Creation (2023), reinterprets traditional Korean lacquerware with digital media, bringing the forgotten past to life and breathing again in a modern space. This project started with a sense of problem that lacquerware, which had become a symbol of wealth in Korea’s urban space from the 1960s to the 1980s, gradually lost its cultural value over time. During the economic recovery period after the Korean War, lacquerware was widely used as a symbol of material wealth and social status, but since the 1990s, the lacquerware has been removed from the public’s attention due to the influx of Western interior products and changes in taste. Today, lacquerware remains artifacts that can only be seen in museums or old homes.

Succession, Yet Creation is based on the theory of Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Benjamin argued that technology replication frees works of art from a parasitic state that relies on their ritual. This implies that art through digital replication provides an opportunity to break away from its inherent aura and access the wider public as a new artistic form. From this perspective, lacquerware can be experienced in a new way in a modern space, no longer trapped in a fixed historical context, by being replicated and reconstructed through digital media. 

This work focused on converting static and flat artifacts into dynamic, three-dimensional visual experiences by replicating and transforming traditional patterns of lacquerware into digital media. Having been symbolic in urban spaces of the past, lacquerware is now being reconstructed from modern space through digital technology. Through this, the audience no longer experiences the cultural meaning of lacquerware as stuffed artifacts, but encounters them in a form that has been interpreted again in a modern context as living art. By extending the aesthetic beauty and symbolism of traditional crafts to digital media technology, Succession, Yet Creation rediscovered its value through interaction with the audience. Ultimately, it shows how traditional craftsmen are reborn in new spaces beyond the symbolic roles of the past through digital media. Lacquerware is not just an artifact that is preserved and remembered, but it is also reconstructed as an art that is newly interpreted and experienced from a contemporary perspective, and is given new life in the modern space.