The Artifacts of Ceremony
Future heirlooms crafted with love and lineage for our self-built wedding.
Weddings As Identity Vessels
My new husband and I met in architecture school, and our wedding was our first real design collaboration. From friends to lovers, we found that we were fundamentally aligned in our pursuit of beauty in the world, which for us encompasses creativity, nature, and romance — the foundation of our shared life.
Weddings are charged with the emotional weight of holding your identity, both as a couple and as individuals. They act as a threshold between your history and your future life. And yet, even with all of that responsibility, weddings are transient — built and struck in just one day.
To reconcile this emotional weight with its fleeting nature, we focused on the creation of artifacts: identity-infused objects that fulfilled their momentary role on the wedding day, but earned a permanent place in our home. Future heirlooms that hold within them this transformational moment in our shared identity, crafted with our own four hands.
Designing Future Heirlooms
My grandparents’ collection of traditional Korean art and furniture, which includes my grandmother’s own paintings, was formative to my identity. Brought over from Korea in the 1980s, these objects rooted my grandparents’ lives within their cultural lineage, even when they were far from home. By adding to the collection through her own painting, my grandmother both preserved and extended her ancestral legacy. In design, I attempt to do the same — interpreting pieces in their collection, filtered through my own identity: mixed, modern, and intertwined with my new husband.
Our design process was an act of synergizing the old and the new, the eastern and western parts of us. We followed the design ethos of the Modernists that shaped us as designers: reducing objects to the core of what they are. For me, it is the spatial relatability of an object that really resonates. This is how I can physically feel the presence of my history. A way to have my grandparents, who have both passed, with me on my wedding day. Each object we designed honours the physicality and function of its traditional precedent, while modernizing material and ornamentation.
The Byeongpung
The principle piece we designed was a folding screen, or byeongpung, used traditionally to demarcate ceremonial space. Recognizing the connection between this function and that of the western wedding altar, we combined the two into one ceremonial centrepiece.
My grandmother’s byeongpung, painted in her signature fruits and flowers, has served as the backdrop for my family’s key Korean ceremonies — most recently, at my brother’s wedding. That original was too fragile to travel from Toronto to Vancouver, leading us to create our homage.
For our interpretation, we maintained the overall form, proportion, and rhythm of the original. The symbolism typically painted onto the panels gave us an opportunity to play. From the ten symbols of longevity traditionally used for weddings — sun, mountains, water, clouds, rocks, cranes, deer, turtle, pine tree, bamboo — we selected a few to abstract. The trees translated to the expressive grain texture of our plywood. The cranes translated to the birds of paradise flowers, framed by apertures cut into the panels. The sun translated to the warm colour palette and tropical origin of the flowers, a theme carried throughout the wedding.
The Lanterns
For light, we wanted something beautiful both in form and atmosphere. We couldn’t find this in any event rental catalogue, so it was another opportunity to craft our own artifacts. Our precedent was the chorong, a traditional lantern. It’s a simple, rectilinear form with a wooden frame and paper lined panels. We had a lamp version in my childhood home that I’ve seen versions of in the family homes of nearly every East Asian person I know. Endlessly pulling at its tassel pull switch may just be a rite of passage.
Maintaining physicality, our lanterns were built to the exact dimensions of that childhood lamp. Abstraction came in material. The frames are hardware cloth — cut, folded, and woven into shape — then wrapped in a layer of linen and sealed with a gesso stiffener. The result is a ghostly echo of the original — familiar in silhouette and glow, but made new in texture and simplicity.
Additionally, we needed wayfinding elements to guide our guests to the ceremony. We developed the same lantern idea to echo the cheongsachorong, a more symbolic hanging lantern used for just that: to light the way for guests attending a cultural event. They are traditionally red and blue, symbolizing yin and yang. This duality was represented by painting a gradient from orange to the raw linen over a more loosely structured version of the lantern that would sway with the breeze, just as the cheongsachorong do.
The Craft
At the time, our new apartment was empty, so it served as a makeshift workshop. The cutting, sanding, staining, and assembly of the artifacts all took place in what is now our living room. Looking up at our ceiling now, I can still see a few stray flecks of wood stain — a record of this chaotic way we first occupied our marital home: a messy, creative production studio for two designers devoted to making their wedding beautiful.
Second Lives
Weddings are inherently ephemeral. This massive output of energy and material lasts for just a single day. This is why we considered the second lives of our wedding artifacts — as functional, full-scale mementos of our wedding day, steeped in personal narrative.
The byeongpung now articulates my new creative production space, somewhat more contained and intentional than the last. The lanterns now lend their soft, romantic glow to our dinners at home. There is a certain alchemy here: the objects, charged with the euphoric energy of our wedding, now emanate that into our everyday lives. Transitioning from sacred to domestic, these objects carry the story of our beginning into every day that follows.
The World of Our Wedding
From The Studio
World building for our wedding fed what I love most about design: beauty, romance, and humanity. If any of this resonates with a future bride or groom, I’d love to offer support in Art Direction and Artifact Design — for couples and brands looking to create temporal worlds with cultural resonance.
Available for projects across Canada or remotely.
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