Op.2-3 Trophy

What I find most compelling about the Op.2-3 Trophy is its ability to present completely different expressions depending on the time of day and the viewer’s position. When viewed from the side, the highly reflective black acrylic surface captures and mirrors its surroundings like a black mirror, creating a sense of depth and ambiguity. When viewed from the front, the colors of the structural elements become more prominent, revealing an entirely different visual identity.This broad optical spectrum is the result of extensive studies into the material qualities of acrylic—its transparency, reflectivity, and ability to refract and transmit light in various ways.What I find particularly fascinating is the moment when the trophy transcends its physical boundary as an object. By transmitting natural or artificial light into the surrounding space, it extends its colors and presence beyond itself, allowing the space around it to become part of the work. Personally, I think the trophy reveals its most beautiful character in the afternoon, when clear sunlight enters at an angle and casts colored shadows across the floor and surrounding surfaces.

I believe that tradition becomes truly alive not when it is merely preserved as a historical form, but when it is reinterpreted through the technologies and discourses of the present. Traditional Korean joinery was originally developed for wood, and translating this technique into acrylic required an entirely different fabrication logic.With wood, components are typically cut using saws or CNC machines, then refined by hand with chisels and sandpaper before being joined together with adhesive and mechanical interlocking. Acrylic, on the other hand, is precisely laser-cut and assembled using a solvent-based adhesive that slightly dissolves the surface, creating a chemical bond between the parts. Because the assembly relies on both physical interlocking and chemical fusion, it demands a much stricter control of tolerances and fabrication precision.At the same time, I wanted to preserve the essential structural intelligence of traditional joinery—its ability to create stability through the relationship between individual components rather than relying solely on external fasteners. By introducing transparent acrylic elements, however, the joinery gains entirely new sensory and visual behaviors. The density of transparency, darkness, and color shifts subtly according to the viewer’s position and the changing conditions of light. The final object not only exists as a structure but also projects its colors into the surrounding space, extending its presence beyond its physical boundaries.In that sense, these optical phenomena are qualities that traditional wooden joinery could never have anticipated, emerging specifically from the encounter between an ancient structural language and a contemporary material.

The Op.2-3 Trophy emerged not only from an extensive study of acrylic in all its optical variations—transparent, translucent, opaque, colored, and tinted—but also through a broader exploration using a range of materials, including paper, wood, aluminum, and 3D-printed prototypes. Each material study became a way of testing not only the form itself but also the structural logic, fabrication methods, and sensory qualities that the final object could embody.I believe that designing an object and translating that design into a physical material are not two separate stages of the same process. The act of materialization is, in itself, a new design project. The same structural system can generate completely different experiences depending on the material, fabrication technique, and scale through which it is realized.For designers working across product design and architecture, the lesson is perhaps to treat materials not simply as a means of executing a predetermined idea, but as active participants in the design process. A willingness to question, investigate, and experiment with the inherent properties and limitations of a material is essential. In many ways, it is through this dialogue between an abstract system and a specific material that unexpected forms, new sensory experiences, and new possibilities for design can emerge.