“Piling up is something everyone can do, but revisiting those piles isn't easy.”Emotions, memories, and experiences, everything about us naturally accumulates over the course of time. Our current mould is made up of accumulated past. I revisit my past self while changing the picture. By constantly expressing my past emotions or experiences into colors, I am also constantly reflecting on myself.

— Kim Deok Han

Whitestone Gallery Beijing is pleased to announce that from 13 April - 11 May 2024, it will present ""Trace of Time"", a solo exhibition by Kim Deok Han (b.1981). This is the artist's first solo exhibition in the Beijing space, and the opening will be held on Saturday, 13 April 2024, from 3-5pm, with the artist himself in attendance. By piling up and removing time from the past, the artist tries to create an image that puts the past and the present on the ""same plane".

Kim Deok Han has been working on the restoration of Buddha statues at temples for ten years. At a temple in Gyeongju, Korea, he discovered a 1,000-year-old Buddha statue that no one knew existed. When he peeled off the surface of the statue, he found that several layers of the statue had been stacked on top of each other like Russian nesting dolls to form a completely new statue and found inspiration for his work and began to think about ""things you can't see if you don't look closely"". Lacquer trees secrete resin to protect and heal their wounds. I hope that through the works made with this material, viewers will be able to reflect on their own lives and recognize their own hearts, and that the wounds in our lives will be healed.

His work is usually scraped under pressure and therefore mainly on relatively hard materials such as wooden panels, stainless steel and aluminum. The wooden panels are first made, then covered with cotton or linen and the pores in the surface are filled in the traditional way, beginning with a repetitive process of stacking and stripping. In this way the work is gradually completed. By mixing various inorganic pigments into the “lacquer paint” at the same time, he creates his own unique colors, which represent memories, emotions and experiences.

The main series of works in this exhibition, OVERLAID SERIES No. 24-01, is inspired by the theme song ""First Step"" from the film Interstellar. The artist wishes to express in this exhibition the grandeur, tension and excitement of mankind's first step into the unknown universe. The film deals with the distortion of time and space, as well as the importance of connections and information between past and future, which is closely related to the theme of his work. Therefore, with the help of APO SOUND, a company that can convert sound into vision, he converted the music into colors and analyzed the data to adjust the distribution and perception of the colors. The artist responds to the tension of the musical rhythms and the corresponding contrast of colors by sanding, sometimes roughly, sometimes softly.