2025
East Asian Lacquer on panel
45.0 × 45.0 cm
Whitestone Gallery Seoul proudly presents “OVERLAID: Time Woven in Lacquer—Forms of Memory by Kim Deok-Han,” on view from October 25 to December 7, 2025.
Following acclaimed presentations at Whitestone Beijing and Taipei, this Seoul exhibition marks the artist’s newest and most expansive exploration of lacquer as a medium where heritage and contemporary sensibility converge. Working with ottchil, Korea’s ancient lacquer tradition,
Kim Deok-Han constructs works in which time, memory, and existence accumulate in layers.
Each piece is created through a repeated cycle of coating, curing, and sanding—a rhythmic, almost ritualistic process that slowly reveals strata where past and present intersect. Every polished rise and every abraded hollow becomes a vessel of memory, a quiet archive of hours, gestures, and intention.
At the center of this exhibition stands a monumental installation from the artist’s celebrated “DIVISION Series.” Spanning 12 meters in width and rising 6 meters high, it transforms the gallery’s second floor into a vast environment of lacquered light and shadow.
Works from the “COMPRESSED Series” and newly unveiled pieces from the “OVERLAID Series” extend Kim’s inquiry into the shifting boundary between painting, sculpture, and objecthood.
Through them, matter acquires rhythm, and space becomes a site where the physical and the spiritual coalesce. Kim’s lacquer practice, however, moves far beyond material experimentation.
Kim Deok HanOverlaid Series No. 25-300-01, 2025East asian lacquer on panel
120 x 220 cm
His methods of layering and erasure serve as meditative acts, offering a metaphor for memory’s persistence—how experiences accumulate, how some vanish, and how others resurface through unexpected fractures of color.
By grounding his work in the discipline of a traditional craft while embracing a rigorously contemporary language, Kim situates himself within the evolving discourse of Korean abstraction in the post-Dansaekhwa era, expanding its horizons and proposing new futures for tradition.
\ Born in 1981, Kim Deok-Han represents a new generation of Korean artists who reinterpret the sensibility of **“淡 (dam)”—the aesthetics of subtlety, quietness, and restraint—**through the venerable medium of lacquer.
Applying successive layers of colored ottchil, he repeatedly sands, peels, and unveils the surfaces, leaving only traces of the layers that once existed.
This painstaking method, requiring six to twelve months for a single work, demands the discipline of patience: each layer must dry completely before another may begin. Kim describes this process as the creation of a temporal diary—a surface that records time not in images, but in accumulated presence.
Every removed layer exposes a past moment; every remaining trace becomes a testament to endurance, absence, and the delicate interplay between appearing and vanishing.
Using lacquer, a material capable of lasting thousands of years, he ensures that these quiet records of time will continue to breathe far into the future.
His palette—rooted in the earthy, muted tones of traditional hanbok—combined with his meditative approach, yields works that feel at once ancient and contemporary.
They are contemplative objects that glow softly from within, inviting viewers into a space where memory is not narrated but felt.
2024
East Lacquer on Panel
140.0 × 115.0 × 4.5 cm
“OVERLAID: Time Woven in Lacquer—Forms of Memory” offers a rare opportunity to witness time materialized, layer by layer.
Through Kim Deok-Han’s deeply disciplined process, the exhibition reveals how presence, absence, and remembrance coexist within a single surface—and how tradition, when reenvisioned through contemporary eyes, can become an entirely new language of abstraction.
