Kim Joon, one of Korea's most notable young contemporary artists, creates digital prints exploring themes of desire, memory and youth using porcelain and tattoos as his digital mediums. He fabricates compositions out of tableware, fragments of idealized nudes, and icons of Western pop culture, including guitars, cars and guns. A master of the computer software 3D Studio Max, Kim successfully juxtaposes old and new, traditional Asian motifs and new media Kim Joon’s works have been exhibited at the Saatchi Gallery, London (where his work was featured on the cover of the book Korean Eye: Contemporary Korean Art, which accompanied the exhibition); Total Museum, Seoul, Korea; The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Kwachon, Korea; and the National Taiwan Museum.
Joon explores the tattoo as a signifier for deeper avenues of identity — either as a vehicle for forming or furthering it, or simultaneously suppressing and subconsciously revealing agency in interplays of desire and fantasy. ‘Drunken - Royal Copenhagen’ is of a series of work which explores the theme through a combination of 3d modelling and renderings of porcelain in eye-popping, violently pop-culture referencing style, the co-option of the Royal Copenhagen “Blue Fluted” motif mirroring and subverting the origin of identity, first developed as a 17th century Western response to Ming and Qing dynasty porcelain design.