Post-Vanitas On Meaning After Collapse Concept and term “Post-Vanitas” created by Jiya Lim, Maison Philosophe, Busan (2025). I did not begin this text in order to enter fine art. I arrived here because, over time, I realized that the life I had passed through—and the sensations that survived it—could no longer be held by the languages already available to me. The existing art system has its own history and language, along with carefully layered traditions of interpretation. Its structure appears autonomous and complete. Yet as time went on, the events I went through, and the feelings that remained afterward, were not clearly named within established aesthetic categories. They seemed to hover at the edges, never fully belonging inside them. Those sensations existed prior to explanation. They were closer to residual states than to what we usually call meaning. Post-Vanitas is the name I give to that residual interval— the space in which meaning continues after collapse b...