Ari Kim (she/her)
Lighting designer
Lighting designer
To me, lighting design is "painting the air" of a production. Based on the observation, I choose the way of seen. Lighting aspects, such as color, quality of lighting, intensity and more are the tools which I used for painting 3-dimensional space. I see my role as a form of gentle hypnosis—using light to draw the audience into the world we create, making them believe in the reality of the stage.
I was raised in an artistic environment, but I was new to the theatre when I started my undergraduate studies. My background was in painting and photography, where I admired the light of Rembrandt and Gregory Crewdson. I was fascinated by how light could pull a viewer into their worlds. I apply this curiosity to my process today, guided by a quote from ‘Theory of Colours’ written by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe:
"The desire of knowledge is first stimulated in us when remarkable phenomena attract our attention. In order that this attention be continued, it is necessary that we should feel some interest in exercising it, and thus by degrees we become better acquainted with the object of our curiosity. During this process of observation we remark at first only a vast variety which presses indiscriminately on our view; we are forced to separate, to distinguish and again to combine; by which means at last a certain order arises which admits of being surveyed with more or less satisfaction."
This "certain order" is what I seek in every production. I see the stage initially as a "vast variety" of possibilities. My work is to distinguish the essential from the secondary and combine them into a unified vision. Through this lens, I approach each production as an artistic statement to the world. Through collaboration, our vast ariety of possibilities with our unified vision unfolds on the stage thus transforms the audience’s view.
Theatre is a fleeting art. Its beauty lives in a single moment, and then disappears. But I believe light can hold onto something from that moment—a feeling, a rhythm, a breath—and let it linger just a little longer. I gather from memory—mine and my collaborators’—and use those shared impressions to create light that listens and responds. I follow impulses, like white noise or wildfire, to discover what we are truly trying to say.