Chae Eunmi is an artist based in South Korea, known for her combination of Mother of Pearl fragments, traditional Korean lacquer and the exploration of light. Chae was born and raised in Icheon, a UNESCO City of Crafts and Folk Art of South Korea. She majored in Western Painting as an undergraduate and moved to Japan to complete her MFA at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music. Today, she is a highly anticipated contemporary artist as she employs various media such as video, sculpting, and architecture in her video art expressing the four-dimensional world of light found in her paintings. Her works are especially well known among the Arab royalty. All her video art pieces were sold out in the Abu Dhabi Art Fair 2023 and also in Dubai Art Fair for three consecutive years, prior. Chae gained her reputation as an outstanding artist through her exhibition organized by the embassy in the National Museum of Sweden. International interests are growing as her works are permanently collected in New York and featured in Hong Kong and Dubai.
Chae employs the use of permanent organic materials when creating her work such as Mother-of-Pearl, Gold, and Traditional Korean Lacquer. As light comes in to fill and unite with the empty spaces in Chae’s works, the golden surfaces of the cubic forms continuously reflect unto one another to create an infinite amount of new spaces and images. These cubes repeat, capturing both the emptiness and profound presence at the same time; and as installations, they are infinitely scalable. The precision of the slight angles in each golden cubic are designed to reflect eternally within the artwork, capturing even the images that the human eye cannot see. For Chae, light is extravagant, humorous, refractive, and considers eternity. Chae chooses to invoke the painted imagery of butterflies to represent her prosperous path in faith beyond her brokenness.
“In the beginning, butterflies were incapable of flying as their wings were all torn up and made of various different fragments. One day, a golden seed was planted in the heart of a butterfly who wanted so dearly to fly and kept growing until it began to sprout leaves, flowers, and fruits. The flowers began to cover and mend the butterfly’s wings until the butterfly was resurrected and finally able to fly towards its dreams while simultaneously spreading the aroma of beauty, love, and blessings to the world. ”
- Story by Chae Eunmi
