Post-Vanitas Era: On Black-Glaze, Ritual, and the Conditions of Continuation

 

Why I Walk With Black-Glaze Sculpture and Tea Rituals Together

I move through one world twice:
once through black-glaze sculpture, and once through the ritual of making tea.

These two practices may appear to diverge, but they return to the same inquiry at different registers:

After collapse, by what means can a human life become operative again?

Black-glaze sculpture is not a condensed question.
It is the ground that precedes the question.

I work in black glaze from the beginning.
Black glaze is not a surface applied after ruin; it is an originating state.
Collapse does not produce black glaze.
Collapse only discloses it.

Kintsugi is not ornament after damage.
It is a second order—an ensuing discipline—that can operate only upon that ground.

In my work, black glaze is closest to human nature:
a given substrate, present before breaking, present after breaking, present even after a return.
Its essence does not change.

Yet nature does not operate in a single way.

On the same ground, choices diverge; time splits; a life takes on different faces.
At one stage, it manifests as desire;
at another, as doubt;
at another, as devotion;
at another, as silence.

For this reason, black glaze in my work is neither good nor evil—
neither fall nor redemption.
It is what a human being does not relinquish, even at the end.
And kintsugi is the subsequent condition:
a mode that activates differently upon the same ground, according to the stage.

My sculpture is not made because nature breaks.
It is a passage—an embodied sequence—through which nature is made visible as it operates across stages.

The tea ritual, by contrast, brings this structure into the duration of a day.

I document not so much the act of drinking as the act of making.
Water is heated; leaves are placed; waiting is introduced; the pour returns.
The materials may change—herbal infusion, coffee, latte—
but what matters is not the result.
What matters is that the time of making itself becomes an order.

To make tea, here, is not to consume an outcome.
It is to reactivate a process:
to let meaning be generated again through time and gesture.

For that reason, I establish structure through black glaze,
and I record its operation through the tea ritual.
If there were only sculpture, this thought could remain separated from life.
If there were only ritual, this stance could be misread as mere sensibility.
This is why it is not a “two-track” practice.
One is structure; the other is generation.
Structure alone cannot live.
Generation alone cannot remain.
By holding both together, I aim to leave Post-Vanitas
not merely as an artistic proposition,
but as a mode of life—an operating principle.

It need not be explained.
If it continues to operate, that is enough.

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

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