Seoul-based designers Kimchi and Chips aren’t your usual creative studio. Their repertoire includes 3D projects, installations and curated light sculptures. Yes, you read correctly. Light sculptures. Kimchi and Chips specialise in creating imaginary realities and digital environments for humans to immerse themselves in. Their work is very experimental and combines conceptual art with science to create floating sculptures and optical illusions.
Kimchi and Chips is Elliot Woods, a digital media artist, technologist, curator and educator from Manchester and Mimi Son, also a media artist born and raised in Seoul. The two banded together in 2009 to combine disciplines of code, form, material and concept which resulted in the formation of the experimental art, design and tech studio. Their installation work has been exhibited in and commissioned by galleries and institutions in four continents and they have the world’s jaws dropping with their incredible catalogue of work online.
They say that their work is driven by the fascination with light, drawing parallels in their methods with impressionist painters. Computer code is their brush strokes, with canvases of the most unconventional kind filled with digital light.
One of their most recent projects, Light Barrier, has been totally blowing our minds. Using millions of light beams, scanning, convex mirrors and fog they have created floating graphic sculptures which animate through space and time. Phantoms of light appear in the air, materialising through puffs of fog. Also worth an online visit is 483 Lines, consisting of analogue picture projected onto 483 nylon threads, 16 meters long, strung up in negative space. The result is hypnotising and totally mesmerising.
See more unexpected, beautiful projects from Kimchi and Chips on their website, Vimeo and blog.
