Post-Vanitas Era: Digital Ritual as a Language of Dignity

January 04, 2026

Post-Vanitas Era Movement:

Digital Ritual as a Language of Dignity

Jiya Lim, Maison Philosophe, Busan, 2025

I do not begin with objects.

I begin with the question of what remains after collapse.

My ceramic works are not endpoints.

They are entrances.

Black-glazed porcelain, a tear, a skull, a crown, a broken surface — these are not sculptures to be completed,

but thresholds through which a larger structure unfolds.

My practice is born digital.

It is not a documentation of physical artworks,

but a composite system in which ceramics, fashion, music, meditation texts, and visual ritual are woven together inside a digital environment.

Only there does the work become whole.

The Artist as Persona, Not Performer

I do not stage myself as a model.

I become a function within the structure.

In the Post-Vanitas Era, the artist is no longer an invisible producer behind objects,

nor a spectacle for consumption.

The artist becomes a persona — a living interface through which the work breathes.

My gestures, silences, rituals of tea, fragments of reflection —

they are not lifestyle content.

They are symbolic operations that bind the fragments of a broken world into a shared rhythm.

From Individual Healing to Collective Dignity

Much of contemporary art speaks about identity, trauma, or personal recovery.

I respect those paths, but my concern begins after them.

I ask:

What happens after survival?

What remains when recovery is no longer enough?

Post-Vanitas Era Movement does not glorify decay.

It names what remains when vanity collapses — dignity, resonance, relational memory.

My symbols — weeping crowned skulls, silent rituals, fragmented vessels —

do not point inward.

They point outward, toward a collective space of re-bonding.

This is not a call for unity through sameness,

but for dignity through shared presence.

Digital Space as a Sacred Field

The digital realm is often dismissed as superficial.

I treat it as a contemporary sanctuary.

In this space, image, sound, language, and silence meet without hierarchy.

Here, a ceramic object can become a moving image,

a gesture can become a sentence,

and a ritual can be experienced by those who never share the same room.

Post-Vanitas exists precisely in this field —

not as content, but as structure.

Toward a Language That Can Outlive Me

My long-term aim is not recognition, but independence of language.

When terms such as Post-Vanitas Emblem or Crowned Mourning Skull

can be spoken without my name,

when others begin to use these symbols to articulate their own questions of dignity,

then the system no longer belongs to me.

It becomes a shared grammar.

That is the true completion of the work.

Closing