True Nature

Lacquer is often used as a finishing material. This is because it is literally a type of varnish applied to materials such as metal, ceramics, and glass. Sung-Youl Park sought a way to show the beauty of the lacquer material itself, and developed a “lacquer stretching” method. The artist makes the viscous lacquer a bit stickier than its original form, mixes different pigments, stretches them out like spider webs with two spatulas, and then wraps them one by one on a bowl-shaped frame. This work was a finalist for the Loewe Craft Prize 2020.