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condition, artists—working with AI—can do almost anything:

manual image-making appears inefficient, even futile. But art may

compose like the old masters, or generate concepts like the new.

well persist in precisely such futility. Consider the contemporary

Does this suggest a rebirth of art after its supposed end?

marathon runner: no longer a messenger carrying urgent news, but an individual testing the limits of the body. The act is no longer

Hardly. If anything, it intensifies the condition of ending. When AI

necessary, yet it acquires new meaning. Likewise, the insistence

can endlessly generate the images artists envision, the artwork

on hand painting in the age of AI is not about producing images,

risks becoming valueless. How, then, might value be restored? A

but about affirming human capability—about sustaining a mode of

possible answer lies in a return to craft. It is precisely through

poetic existence.

his commitment to technique that Kim Jun-sik transfigures the ordinary into art.

Kim Jun-sik does not, however, retreat into nostalgic subjects. He does not idealize beauties or indulge in picturesque

TRANSFIGURATION — ON THE PAINTINGS OF KIM JUN SIK

Auspicious Cranes 120×40cm(6 pannels) Oil on Korean paper, 22k gold leaves 2018

By Peng Feng

“Transfiguration” is a concept Arthur Danto borrows from religion to theorize contemporary art. To clarify it, he invokes the well-known saying of Qingyuan Weixin: “Seeing mountains as mountains; seeing mountains not as mountains; and finally, seeing mountains still as mountains.” For Danto, contemporary art is art that recognizes itself as art. Apart from this added layer of “recognition,” it is indistinguishable from ordinary objects—

Kim’s paintings enact a kind of alchemy. His subjects are

landscapes. Instead, he paints the ordinary realities of his own

mundane: tree branches, banana peels, even crushed cans

time, articulating a personal understanding of life and revealing a

reminiscent of Warhol’s soup imagery. Yet unlike Warhol’s iconic

distinct temperament. While such images could be generated by

cans, Kim depicts them flattened—cheaper, more abject, and

AI, without Kim’s prior act of painting, who would have imagined

formally unpredictable. His choice of subject underscores a crucial

them in this way? The principle that “painting reflects the person”

point: the value of painting does not reside in what is depicted,

becomes more urgent than ever in the age of AI. Just as running

but in how it is made. What transfigures the ordinary here is not

a marathon today is no longer about delivering a message but

concept, but technique.

about demonstrating one’s capacity, painting is no longer about producing images but about manifesting an inner disposition. To a

To advocate a return to craft may sound conservative, even

certain extent, what viewers respond to in Kim’s work is not only

regressive. Yet it is precisely this “untimeliness” that may sustain

the painting, but the person behind it.

painting. In an age when AI can generate any image on demand, Out of the frame 55×55cm Oil on Canvas 2024

Brillo cartons and Warhol’s fabricated replicas, such distinctions are not decisive. What matters is intention: Warhol consciously produced them as artworks, whereas factory workers did not. The alchemical transformation is not grounded in material, craft, or quality, but in consciousness—in the recognition of something as art. It is precisely this transformative awareness, Danto contends, that signals the “end of art.”

just as the final stage of “seeing mountains still as mountains” is perceptually identical to the initial stage.

When Danto passed away in 2013, artificial intelligence had not yet reached its current level of development. Image generation

In this framework, Andy Warhol and his Brillo Boxes become exemplary . Danto argu es tha t Wa rho l, t hro ugh a form of “awareness,” transfigured supermarket packaging into art. Although there are material differences between commercial

remained in its infancy. Had he lived longer, he might have witnessed that artists are no longer limited to transfiguring readymades through recognition; with AI, they can externalize their “awareness” into fully realized visual forms. In this expanded 5