The Orchestra of Lights is the creation of a space by using lights in the dark. Kim An-Sik, the artist who has experimented with the potential of light as an artistic medium since 1996, aims to create music that can be visible. The instruments Kim uses for The Orchestra of Lights are the objects that are used as a screen on which images of light, such as space, time, artist’s activity, water, darkness, and a whale, are reflected. In the work, the artist projects lights through water, which he uses to create his own figurative language, and reveals an artistic space on the water surface. His recent works made in this way include Water Piano, which is made by using wavelengths of water and colored lights, and Gayageum of Lights, in which 12 strings of a Gayageum (a traditional Korean zither) are expressed by laser beams. In these works, Kim successfully achieves a wonderful artistic harmony with creative visual rhythms that cross over multiple genres free from all tradition.
What are required for Kim’s works are light as an artistic medium, a space needed to visualize an image of light, time which is the duration of his project, and a screen on which images are presented.
Kim’s artistic purpose in this work is to quest for a concrete and physical relationship between two kinds of space, one in the real world and another in the world of art. For him, these two spaces can be crossed by the use of light. A light, according to Bachelard, is something that, like candlelight, makes us “dream what is far”°. It creates a space that can be passed through, a space that is not fixed, yet can be replaced and is not uncertain. Kim’s lights are a kind of ‘ladder’ that leads us to the fantastic space.
- From “The Orchestra of Lights：
Secret Tunes Shared with Darkness” by Yim Yeon
° Gaston Bachelard, La Flamme D’une chandelle, Paris, Quadrige / P.U.F, 1961, p.23
