IT’S fitting that Esther Jin Kim and Joseph Rosenwald Varet met because of their support of Performa, an organization in New York that promotes the work of performing artists. After all, these are two people who approach life as a kind of experiential art form.

For them, even the most mundane activity is an opportunity for artistic expression. Mr. Varet, 35, has been known to drive from farm stand to farm stand to find just the right produce for a picturesque beach picnic. And Ms. Kim, 29, stores her countless pairs of designer jeans in a glass case rather than using something as prosaic as a chest of drawers.

“They both have a highly developed aesthetic sense,” said Dr. Audrey Chun, Ms. Kim’s cousin and director of the Martha Stewart Center for Living at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York.

Mr. Varet was captivated from the moment he first saw Ms. Kim. It was April 2009, and she had arrived late to a meeting of young patrons of Performa called to plan a benefit gala. But Ms. Kim, who graduated from Yale and was a busy Ph.D. candidate in the history of art at Columbia University and a part-time art dealer, didn’t notice him, despite taking the seat next to his.





“When I saw her it was like I had been working on this puzzle and someone had suddenly given me the answer,” said Mr. Varet, who the year before had sold the company he co-founded, LX.TV, to NBC Universal for a reported $10 million. (A broadband network and online production company, it is perhaps best known for the programming that plays in the back of New York taxicabs.) Continue reading the main story





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He had been looking for a like-minded aesthete to share his life.

“Joseph achieved professionally beyond his wildest dreams and thought, Now what?” said his younger brother, David Varet. “I think he was finally ready for love.”

Their mother, Elizabeth Rosenwald Varet, who is the chairwoman of American Securities Group and granddaughter of Julius Rosenwald, an owner and president of Sears, Roebuck & Company, agreed that her elder son was ready for love but added dryly, “I have this theory that people get married to get out of the agony of dating.”

Mr. Varet’s interest was piqued by the fact that Ms. Kim, whose parents immigrated to Dallas from Seoul shortly before she was born, is Korean. Mr. Varet’s friends and family said that he had long had an affinity for Asian art, cuisine and culture and had traveled extensively in Asia.

Mr. Varet got Ms. Kim’s e-mail address from group e-mails sent out by Performa and began inviting her to dinners in Koreatown as well as to the opera and art gallery openings. She accepted his invitations but only because she had an ulterior motive.

“I thought he was in technology and could help set up a Web site for my art dealing,” she said. When it became clear he didn’t know much about creating Web sites, she tried to discourage him by telling him she had a boyfriend in Paris (although she knew that relationship wasn’t going anywhere). He was not deterred. “He was pretty persistent,” she said. “But in a patient way, not an annoying way.”

Friends describe Mr. Varet’s and Ms. Kim’s personalities as complementary: He is calm and deliberative while she is passionate and spontaneous. “Joseph grounds Esther,” Dr. Chun said. “And I think she brings him out of himself.”

A few weeks after they began seeing each other, he made a bold move.

They were attending the Performa benefit they had helped plan, and in midsentence he kissed her.





“I didn’t know what to do,” Ms. Kim said. “I was talking, and he kissed me, and then I continued talking where I left off.”

Mr. Varet said, “Either she was ignoring me or oblivious, but I wanted to make it clear how I felt.”

Up to that point, she did not think of him as boyfriend material, much less a potential husband, because her parents wanted her to marry a Korean. “I have always been very sensitive to pleasing my parents,” she said.

The kiss, she said, began to change her attitude, as did the icons next to his name as she read Gotham magazine’s 2009 “100 Hottest Bachelors” rankings. Along with a pile-of-money icon, which meant he was wealthy, and a pile-of-books icon, which meant he was smart (he has an undergraduate degree from Harvard and an M.B.A. from Columbia), he also had an apple-pie icon, which meant he was good to take home to Mom.

“I know it sounds silly, but that really got me thinking,” she said. “I really started wondering if my parents, although he wasn’t Korean, would love him, too, for their daughter.” Photo

The couple after their vows. Credit Michael Stravato for The New York Times Sensing he was making progress, and after several more dates, Mr. Varet invited himself to visit her in South Korea, where she spent her summers. Her parents, Chang and Susan Kim, have homes in Seoul, Dallas and Kona, Hawaii. But two days before Mr. Varet was scheduled to leave for South Korea, he had a biking accident on the Hudson River bike path and fractured his left kneecap. His doctor advised against travel, but Mr. Varet, in a leg brace, was determined.

“I wouldn’t see her for eight or nine weeks and knew she’d forget all about me if I didn’t go,” he said.

Ms. Kim pushed him around Seoul in a wheelchair. “It wasn’t all that attractive,” she said. “My grandmother who had had a stroke could get around better than he could.”

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But her family was impressed. “They said he must really like me to go to so much effort,” she said. “He worked so hard to get my attention.”





When he returned to the United States later that summer, he worked tirelessly to rehabilitate his knee before Ms. Kim joined him at his rented summer house in the Hamptons.

“He was constantly exercising with a pursed brow and focused stare — like Rocky,” said Peter Friedland, who shared the house with Mr. Varet and who has known him since high school. “This was a Joseph Varet I had never seen before. A Joseph in gym clothes. A Joseph in love.”

Everything the two of them did together that August was studied and artful, from the particular way they ground and brewed coffee, to the beach time they spent not sunning or swimming but painting watercolors to present to each other.

They began to see the beauty in their differences.

“He’s solid where I’m like water,” Ms. Kim said. “I never caught him in a lie.”

Last year, the couple extended their reach for artistic expression and perfection by embarking on a four-month trip to Southeast Asia to discover the best street food, something both are passionate about.

“We went to all the most obscure food carts to eat some of the most bodacious foods imaginable,” Ms. Kim said. “It was that adventurous spirit, whether we’re in L.A., Brooklyn, Seoul or Penang, that propelled us to spend so much time together, to explore and share experiences and that will inspire us to keep going tomorrow.”

The couple concluded their travels with a visit during the Thanksgiving holiday to Ms. Kim’s parents’ home in Hawaii, where Mr. Varet proposed in front of several family members, including her parents.

“Before I proposed, I had to have a sit-down with her father, who is very traditional,” Mr. Varet said. “He had to make me sweat a little. He knew I hadn’t been working and wanted to know why.” He passed muster by explaining that he was making investments in start-up media companies.

Mr. Varet gave Ms. Kim a $4 ring bought at a beach stand; he knew she would want to design her own ring.

On April 9, the couple stood surrounded by 14 austere, plum-colored paintings by the abstract artist Mark Rothko at the nondenominational Rothko Chapel in Houston. The Rev. Shawn Kang, a Presbyterian minister, officiated with Rabbi Monty Eliasov taking part in the ceremony. The bride’s brother, Abraham Kim, played the processional on his Hawaiian ukulele.

After the religious ceremony, guests gathered for a seated Korean banquet at the Sheraton Houston Brookhollow Hotel, owned by the bride’s father. The hotel’s ballroom had been transformed into what looked like a mod nightclub: the floor covered with iridescent white synthetic turf, the walls draped with folds of frothy, white fabric, accented with turquoise and orange lighting.

The trendy ambience contrasted with the Korean paebaek ceremony, during which the couple wore traditional silk robes, known as hanboks, as he carried her piggyback around the room to symbolize his ability to support her.

The couple will continue their quest for artistic adventure, once back from an African safari honeymoon. They will live in Venice Beach, Calif., where the bridegroom bought a three-story contemporary town house. Ms. Kim hopes to show and sell art in an exhibition space on the ground floor as she finishes her Ph.D. dissertation, which focuses on the influence of computer technology on conceptual art.

She said that art, like street food, is a connection she and Mr. Varet share that sustains and nourishes their relationship: “It’s always changing form and creating challenges to old ways of thinking, or savoring, the world.”