Post-Vanitas Era Movement: Observations on an Alternative Route of Emergence Jiya Lim, Maison Philosophe, Busan, 2025

 

Post-Vanitas Era Movement:

Observations on an Alternative Route of Emergence

Jiya Lim, Maison Philosophe, Busan, 2025

Contemporary art institutions have historically developed through a relatively stable sequence of validation.

Exhibitions, critical discourse, art fairs, and museum acquisition have formed a familiar constellation of legitimacy.

Within this structure, social platforms have largely functioned as supplementary channels of visibility, while ceramics and Eastern aesthetics have often been positioned at the periphery of contemporary discourse.

My recent work has prompted a quiet observation:

what happens when this order unfolds differently?

Not as a challenge, but as an alternative trajectory that appears to be emerging organically.

1. Instagram as an Initial Archive

In the context of Post-Vanitas, Instagram functions not primarily as a promotional device, but as a preliminary site of accumulation.

The works first appear as repeated visual acts:

black surfaces, moments of fracture, gold interventions, and the continuity of ritualized gestures.

Rather than preceding institutional recognition, these actions circulate and sediment before they are framed.

In this sense, the platform gradually becomes an informal archive — a place where language takes form prior to formal contextualization.

2. Ceramics as a Material Discourse

While ceramics is often discussed within the framework of craft, black-glazed ceramic offers a material condition that is uniquely suited to contemporary inquiry.

Its weight, its susceptibility to fracture, and its capacity to retain traces of intervention distinguish it from pictorial representation.

The work does not depict rupture.

It holds rupture.

Here, ceramics operates less as an object and more as a record of events.

3. An Eastern Grammar as Contemporary Method

The Post-Vanitas approach does not adopt Eastern aesthetics as a stylistic reference, but engages with it as a method of operation:

• restraint of material

• repetition as structure

• disciplined surfaces

• silence as form

This grammar does not position itself as heritage, but as a viable contemporary logic.

4. A Gradual Reconfiguration of Visibility

Traditionally, recognition precedes circulation.

In this emerging route, circulation appears to precede recognition.

The works accumulate through repeated exposure, allowing patterns to be perceived before they are named.

Institutional engagement, when it occurs, does so through encounter rather than discovery.

Conclusion

"Post-Vanitas Era Movement" may beunderstood not as a new style, but as a reconfiguration of how authorship and visibility are quietly taking shape in the present moment.

From Busan,
from black glaze,
from fracture,

an alternative route of emergence continues to unfold.

Concept and term “Post-Vanitas Era” created by Jiya Lim, Maison Philosophe, Busan (2025).

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