Youngjun Kim 'In Search of Lost Light'

Youngjun Kim, an Artist Who Carries the Future of Korean Mother-of-Pearl Art

— Sosung Jung (Professor Emeritus, Dankook University; novelist)

Youngjun Kim is a figure of exemplary determination, one who has arrived at this point through countless trials and errors and unrelenting effort. Building on a thousand-year lineage of Korean najeon lacquerware dating back to the Three Kingdoms period, he has pursued new color sensibilities and diversity, forming a singular creative world of his own — moving najeon from furniture ornament into a medium with genuine artistic and spatial presence.

Would it be an exaggeration to compare the mother-of-pearl works he has created to the emergence of Impressionism, which in one stroke transformed centuries of Western traditional color painting into modern painting, or to Seurat, who introduced pointillism, or to Cézanne, forerunner of Cubism? In 2008, a commission from Bill Gates finally brought the passion he had patiently nurtured over years of hardship into full bloom. "Because I love light, I finally send out light," the artist says — a single sentence that speaks for the years he has walked.

Youngjun Kim is working with all his strength to breathe new life into najeon lacquerware, a traditional Korean craft that is gradually being lost. Through the meeting of tradition and the contemporary, he seeks the light that has been lost. One looks forward with anticipation to seeing what form Youngjun Kim's passion for the new will take next.