Interior Daydreams
Art Direction Playground: Introducing Desk Crits Vol. I
Happy December! Hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving. I had a jam-packed November - moved apartments, planned and hosted my first New York gallery (birthday) party in Tribeca, worked on a soon-to-publish Array piece, danced at the Brooklyn Museum on opening night of Solid Gold, and celebrated fellow Stanford Arts alum Song’s first NY solo show with friends new and old. Then lastly the cherry on top - a deeply restorative vacation week split between LA and Tulum.
Now that festive season is in full swing, I return from my hiatus bearing gifts: introducing Volume I of Desk Crits, a new column on Taming the Light dedicated to the joy of play in the creative process. Hope you enjoy.
As always, thank you for reading and supporting Taming the Light. I am endlessly grateful we get to share this beautiful corner of the internet together.
Love, LK
Desk crits were my favorite part of design studio classes in college.
They are essentially live critiques during design projects: I would roll out my drawings, pin them to the wall, and present my developing concept. My classmates would gather and inspect. The instructor thinks out loud with rapid-fire questions and feedback. Why this silhouette? The shading here is too light. What if you take this in a different direction? Sometimes the instructor would pick up the marker himself and draw over my sketches. Maybe we debate. Maybe I get unstuck. Maybe I decide to scrap everything I’ve worked on to start from scratch all over again.
I remember going into every crit slightly nervous, then emerge brimming with giddiness over fresh creative ideas to experiment with. It’s less about the outcome but the dynamism of the process. It’s generative, non-linear, often messy, and wonderfully fun - the exact feeling inspiring the new Desk Crits column here on Taming the Light.
Despite (or perhaps because of) not working in a creative field since school, I treat nearly all other facets of my life as serious art direction projects. Whether it’s pairing the right pants with Carel Kinas, writing, playing with living room layouts, assembling a dinner plate, or dreaming up a gallery birthday party (which deserves its own upcoming Desk Crit issue later), there is always a guiding creative vision - then brought to life through iterative visual research, design judgement, concept development, and ongoing experimentation.
Desk Crits is my effort to document and share these creative projects in a format most authentic to the process: design sketches, progress shots, journal entries, and writing to tie everything together.
On the heels of moving into my third apartment in New York, this first Desk Crit issue is all about home interior design.
Let’s have some fun.
Taming the Light Presents:
The house, even more than the landscape, is a “psychic state,” and even when reproduced as it appears from the outside, it bespeaks intimacy.
― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
I’ve always found interior design among the most important art direction endeavors of all. It is a sacred ritual to create a home out of a space, so one can awake every day surrounded by the most intimate, immediate beauty and fall asleep the same. Home is Gaston Bachelard’s site of daydream:
If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.
― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
Moving, then, is a figurative and literal new beginning. It’s a thrillingly self-indulgent creative exercise: each room with four walls of blank canvases, windows awaiting to be breathed into their full potential of home.
Like daydreaming, home is also an extension of one’s interior life - a private space allowing full freedom for auto-valorization. Home objects - photographs, furniture, personal mementos - are all emotive, collectively encapsulating a memory palace’s worth of daydreams.
So here is mine -
At a Glance
What this Desk Crit may look like on a wall:
Visual Research
The Space
We start from this empty box.
There’s a delicate balance to executing a singular creative vision while complementing and elevating the space’s existing structural features. My first apartment in New York was 31 floors up in a midtown skyscraper. Diamond-shaped floor-to-ceiling windows enveloped the entire length of the living room and bedroom with views all the way over the East River, leaving just a rectangular walled panel in the middle for decor.
The Objets d’Art
The middle wall dimensions were perfect for a 36’’x 48’’ portrait painting. I knew I wanted the space to be filled with my own art, so I began painting again in this apartment. I approached my first painting with the explicit intention to place it on this wall. To test out color combinations between the painting and cityscape, I mocked up many versions of what some of my favorite paintings would look like if placed here:
I eventually opted for a colorful, abstract composition with deep Klein blue accents. It’s cacophonous, dynamic, and bright; I thought it emblematic of my first month living in New York.
As for living room furniture - I admittedly drew major inspiration from Patrick Bateman’s dangerously sleek bachelor pad in American Psycho:
Sharp angles and rectangular forms recur as spatial motifs - anchored by the two black leather Barcelona chairs. Modernist icons. I also found a Bateman-inspired rectangular glass coffee table, but chose a beige sofa instead of Bateman’s pristine white to preserve monochromatic contrast with more warmth. More black accents resonate through the rug pattern and credenza rim. But do not fret - the flowers and the painting punctuate the sterility completely - I’m no psycho after all.
In this midtown apartment, I completed four large paintings and many smaller ones, each to create a different mood specific to its space. For example:
The bedroom is all about tranquility. I love the visual echoes of dusty blue and orange here between the painting and cityscape outside. Every morning at dawn, the sun casts a wondrous golden sheen on the painting. The waves come alive. It is a good morning.
Living Experiments
And now we move to a new apartment.
Everything is different: layout. Wall dimensions. Orientation. Sun exposure. To arrange existing furniture and art here is to solve a dynamic puzzle: what fits best where? Can we still preserve some of the essence of the last place? Can we create something fresh with what we have?
This is the living experiment: arranging and re-arranging. Adaptation. Assimilation. Re-invention. Don’t people do the same in new environments?
Details
Objects that are cherished really are born of an intimate light…We experience a sort of consciousness of constructing a house, in the very pains we take to keep it alive, to give it all its essential clarity.
― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
What is it that strikes you about a vacant house? I suppose it has something to do with the fact that any house that’s been lived in, any room that's been slept in, is not vacant anymore. From that point on it's forever occupied…
― Photography text from Wright Morris’ 1948 novel, From the Home Place. Published in The Paris Review Issue 120, Fall 1991
Fin.
More on Painting
On At the River:
On Breathe Easy II:
So creative how you applied the idea of desk crit to interior design! The way you've decorated your apartments is so beautiful and chic, and I love how you managed to keep the art the same while finding new homes for it.