Jiana’s Magic on Display

Her ceramic art is an instrument she creates and plays with her inimitable artistry

Artist Jiana Kim, who made the LG Electronics Whisen’s Jiana air conditioner a best seller in recent years, held a solo exhibition of her inimitable art pieces with the title “Accelerando” from April 3-28 at In The Box Gallery just across from the Galleria, a luxury brand department store in the Apgujeong area in southern Seoul, winning huge acclaim for her splendid art work.
The artist made a name for herself from the time her work entitled “From Point to Point” went on display at a public selection of art objects exhibited by the Whanki Foundation in 2007. Her reputation grew faster after she designed the LG Whisen air conditioners in 2008-2009, which became among the top sellers in the country.
Curator Jang Dong-kwang notes that Jiana Kim renders a world. To her, ceramic art is an instrument, he says in his critique on Jiana’s artistry. He adds that Jiana is an artist who performs the whole process, as she doesn’t just play the instrument, but makes it as well.
Jiana’s artworks start with sculptural pieces with small lights. Those small lights on top of small sculptural pieces gather together to form a large light.
The natural light from the sun and moon, the absolute sources of light, join with man-made lights as intended by artists through the thin surfaces of art pieces maximizing variable factors.
Lights in sculptures means they start as sculptural elements and the colors in those lights let us learn through experiences 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 use other diverse materials such as ceramic bowls and crystal, just like painters use diverse color paints to color their works, create images in canvasses, the critic said. She reflects lights to the maximum through LED (light emission diode) and the use of a dimmer to show the sequence of lighting and its reflection.
“Total Eclipse 2008” is made up of paper-thin ceramic pieces created with 1,250 degrees celsisus heat with each of them made with the sculptress’ hands, having different thicknesses and forms. “Such sculptural pieces absorb natural light, each having its own completeness with the moon’s intense red color, with a delicate and yet rough surface visualized with movements changing by lights and time. She showed us a grandiose and mystical total eclipse that we haven’t seen so far through these movements,” one 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 for escape from the dryness and isolation of the inside of a building and connected with the outside, meeting with nature and light that leak 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 memory.
The artist captures special incidents and memories that occur in life that go through all kinds of changes and fade away and visualize them 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 Jang said, “The thin transparent pottery pieces resemble the split leaves of pteridales in forms in every way in its own similarity and a special characteristic of repeating such a resembling process. 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 and a master’s degree in fine arts at Montclair State University and finished a doctoral degree at the Seoul National University College of Fine Arts. nw

“Tornado”; 800 x 250 cm; 1,280 centigrade; Porcelain; 2002

(left) “Puzzle”; 100x14 cm; Porcelain; each vessel approx. 9cm in diameter; 2008

(right) Dimension variable (each vessel approx. 9 cm in diameters); 2007

“Hope”; Dimensions variable (each vessel approx. 9 cm in diameters); 2008

Have a Nice Day: Dimension variable; 2008

Artist Kim Jiana