[material test]

MATERIAL TEST SERIES I

2021

Lacquer, Glass Fibre, Wood

Seoul, South Korea

Tradition survives not through preservation alone, but through adaptation.

A process repeated without change eventually becomes history. A process subjected to continual transformation remains alive. What endures is rarely the material itself, but the logic that allows the material to evolve.

Material Test Series I emerged from Tae's growing fascination with lacquer and the centuries of knowledge embedded within its application. Having undergone extensive training in traditional Korean and Japanese lacquer techniques, he became increasingly interested in extending these processes beyond the materials for which they were originally conceived.

Central to this investigation was the technique known as baesagi.

Historically, hemp is applied across a wooden surface before successive layers of lacquer are introduced to strengthen and protect the object beneath. The process functions simultaneously as reinforcement and preservation, creating a resilient skin capable of surviving generations of use.

What interested Tae was not the technique itself, but the question hidden within it.

If hemp represented the technological fabric of its own time, what might its contemporary equivalent be?

The answer emerged through glass fibre.

Commonly associated with surfboards, marine construction, and industrial fabrication, glass fibre possesses a structural logic remarkably similar to hemp. Both function as woven membranes. Both depend upon a secondary material to bind and strengthen their surfaces. Both acquire their final character through combination rather than isolation.

Replacing hemp with glass fibre, Tae began to apply lacquer according to traditional methods whilst introducing a contemporary material language.

A curious transformation occurred.

In its dry state, glass fibre appears opaque and dense. Yet when saturated, it begins to disappear. The woven structure gradually reveals itself as transparent, allowing light and depth to move through the surface in unexpected ways.

Present and absent.

Visible and invisible.

Structure and transparency existing simultaneously.

The resulting work occupies a territory between historical process and contemporary invention. Traditional lacquer techniques remain intact, yet the material through which they operate has been displaced.

The work therefore functions less as an object than as a proposition.

A suggestion that tradition need not remain fixed to the materials from which it originated.

That preservation may itself become a form of transformation.

And that every inherited process contains within it the possibility of another future.

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