Hyunju Kim

The Uncertain Beauty of Najeon

Inside a practice where metal holds the light of the sea

If you ask what the most beautiful combination of colours in the world is, the first thing that comes to mind is the iridescent shimmer of Najeon (나전) — the Korean art of mother-of-pearl inlay. It is a beauty that resists description, and the longer you look at it, the stranger it becomes: every fragment of shell holds a colour that occurs exactly once, drawn straight from nature and never repeated.

Hyunju Kim builds on this material through geumtae-chil (금태칠), a high-temperature lacquering technique applied to metal, and kkeuneumjil (끊음질), the painstaking practice of cutting and setting shell piece by piece. The result sits somewhere between opposites: cold metal as a base against the brilliance of shell, glamour and austerity held in the same object. Looking at a piece made with this exact balance, you find yourself imagining nature without end.

Finding Metal with Najeon 

As an undergraduate, Kim studied a range of materials — textiles, ceramics, wood, metal. It was metal that clicked for her. Unlike the others, it pushed back, letting her bend and reshape it exactly as she had pictured it. That relationship deepened into a master's degree in metalwork, and it was during those years that she took a class with Son Dae-hyun, a Seoul Intangible Cultural Property master in traditional Korean lacquer, Ottchil (옻칠). There she learned to lacquer metal through Geumtae-chil (금태칠), and then how to set mother of pearl, Najeon, into that surface. It was also in that class that something clicked: she realised she could use the differing properties of metal itself to produce whatever colour she wanted. From then on, she found herself hungry for colour, for texture, for something metal alone could not give her.

By the time she finished her master's, she had not yet made her name as an artist working with Najeon. If anything, it was the opposite: the thesis piece that carried her name at that point, Have a Dream, was made of metal alone. It was shown at the Saatchi Gallery in London and to her own surprise, was picked up as the cover image for a major UK art publication.

It was only once her formal studies had ended that she pursued the direction she had always wanted, applying Najeon to that same piece, Have a Dream, and began working out what the class with Son Dae-hyun had only begun to show her. That single decision became the real turning point: the moment she started to be known as an artist who pairs geumtae-chil with Najeon.

An Ocean that is Secretly White

Look at Kim's Sea Wave series and you see an ocean. Deep blues shifting into vivid emeralds, a surface that seems to move. The secret, she says, is that none of it is really blue: the mother-of-pearl she works with is entirely white. She paints the metal base beneath it pitch black, and it is that blackness refracting through a translucent shell that produces the illusion of oceanic colour. Because the shell keeps reacting to whatever light surrounds it, the finished piece never quite settles. Its colour shifts with the angle you view it from, the height of the pedestal it sits on and the lighting on any given day: "uncertain beauty," in her words. That uncertainty comes at a cost: if a piece does not hold the exact feeling she had set out to capture once it is finally under the light, she will strip the shell away entirely and begin again.

The piece traces back to her own encounters with wild places. Sea Wave began with a nine-day trip to Lake Louise in the Canadian Rockies. She remembers being overwhelmed by the scale of the mountains standing guard over that still water, and wanting to carry that memory into physical form: a fluid, light-filled shell held in a sharp, structured metal vessel.

“Every design language is already out there in nature. My job as an artist is simply to translate the visual vocabulary I see into physical matter."

Balance as philosophy

Balance, Kim says, is the real principle behind all of it. On a form built entirely from metal, the mother-of-pearl has to settle in as if it belonged there from the start, easing naturally into the metal surface, until the two feel inseparable. Neither material is allowed to dominate the other. If the metal overpowers, the piece turns cold and closed; if the shell overpowers, it turns gaudy. The work only holds together when that balance is exact.

Maintaining that balance means constant study, in keeping with her current position as a professor. Listening to her about firing temperatures, at what heat vermilion or black lacquer sets best, or at what temperature brass and white copper should each be fired, it becomes clear just how seriously she takes her craft.

She is aware that her work is often described as a "modern reinterpretation of tradition," but that is not quite how she sees it. She thinks of herself, first, as a contemporary metal artist who happens to use traditional Korean materials as her palette. The balance it carries, the beauty of nature it holds, are indeed contemporary - geumtae-chil and Najeon are centuries old, but the questions Kim is asking through her pieces are not. They are questions about memory, translated into a form that changes depending on the light around it. That is the real measure of what Kim does with tradition: not updating it, but asking it to hold things it was never asked to hold before.