Trent Kim

Lumia is an early 20th century art form founded, and claimed as the eighth fine art, by Thomas Wilfred. Wilfred was a Danish born American artist whose legacy has largely been acknowledged in a series of his automated Lumia works in galleries. Lumia's original aesthetics of light have inspired a number of artists in the field of light sculpture, visual music and light show. Lumia is arguably used as an adjective to describe a particular style of light display that realises caustic effects, or gives an impression of caustic.

In his last radio interview (1968), Wilfred confirmed Lumia as a silent performance of light in a concert hall, but the lack of documentation on his performed Lumia offers a critical opportunity to be re-investigated in understanding the true value of this new art movement of the time.

Lumia is the primary case study in this research, and Trent Kim proposes aesthetics of caustic through light and host-parasite media ecology as two main findings in his literature/practice review around Lumia, and he questions 'How does the medium of light make itself irreducible in a hybrid art form?'

As a practice-led research, Trent Kim approaches this question by documenting his process of creating 'live caustic art,' and also through studying and experimenting different ways for light to parasite host media: the seven fine arts.