A Marvelous Art with Lights

Sculptress Kim creates unique art world employing lights on her scultprual art pieces

Sculptress Kim Jiana’s artworks start with sculptural pieces with small lights. Those small lights on tops of small sculptures gather together to form a large light.
The natural lights from the sun and moon, the sources of absolute light, join with manmade lights, as intended by the artist, through the thin surfaces of art pieces maximizing a variety of factors.
Lights in sculptures mean their start as sculptural elements and the colors in those lights let us learn through our thoughts, time, hours, memory and others, an art critic said.
Jiana says all visible factors created by lights and the spaces made by their movements lead us into the same spaces. The sculptress not only uses thin transparent ceramic pieces, but also other diverse materials such as ceramic bowls and crystal, just as painters use diverse colors of paints to create images on canvas, the critic said. She reflects lights to the maximum through LED (light emission diode) and dimmer sources to show the sequence of lighting and its reflection.

















“Total Eclipse 2008” is made up of paper-thin ceramic pieces created with Celsius 1,250 degree heat with each of them made with the sculptress’ hands with varying thickness and form. Such sculptural pieces absorb natural light, each having its own completeness with the moon’s intense red color and delicate yet rough surfaces visualized with movements changing by lights and time. “She showed us a grandiose and mystic total eclipse that we haven’t seen so far through these movements,” an art critic said.
“The Moon Over Lake, 2009” depicts the movements of the moon over a lake in sensitive blue light hue and have them scooped up so that the viewers would experience new water and new light. “The Wall, 2009” described the need to escape from the dryness and isolation of the inside of a building and connected it with the outside, meeting with nature and light that leaks out of the windows.
























Lights seen outside the windows and the walls and their images appear to be like a channel leading to an ideal world with Oriental warmth, ambience and a tour of one’s memory.
The artist captures special incidents and memories that occur in life that result in all kinds of changes and fade away and give new meanings to them with sculptural interpretations.
These reflect the artist’s thematic awareness to examine nature’s order that exits in our world and its original meanings.
Art critic Chang Dong-gwang said, “The thin transparent pottery pieces resemble the split leaves of pteridales in their forms in every way in its own similarity and a special characteristic of repeating such resemblances. Such daring style pulls in the viewers’ time, the time’s movement and real situations into her art pieces.”
Sculptress Kim Jiana won the leading artist award in 2009. She earned a BFA degree at Parsons School of Design, a master’s degree in fine arts at Montclair State University and a doctoral degree at the Seoul National University College of Fine Arts. nw

A Lake in the Moonlight: 100x100x5 cm; Ceramic; LED, Dimmer; 2009

Solar Eclipse; 100x100x5 cm; Ceramic; LED; Dimmer; 2009

Moon over Lake; 100x100x5 cm; Ceramic; LED, Dimmer; 2009

Story of Light; 620x200x6 cm; Ceramic; LED; Dimmer; 2009

Sculptress Kim Jiana.

A view of art pieces on display at the exhibition.