Speaking That Everybody Can Do but Nobody Can Do :
From Kim Nam Hyeon’s <Single> to, <Cross Tolerance>
Choi Hee seung(Curator at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art)
Devices for Me and Others
Literally understood, this may sound too familiar or a bit ambiguous. It’s because Kim Nam Hyeon’s main interest may be summarized into relationships that individuals as humans endlessly experience in a society. As an artist whose college major was sculpture, Kim Nam Hyeon treats stereoscopy as his major medium. Having undergone formal transformation several times from the Single and Confined One series in the early portion of the first decade of the new millennium to the recent series of Familiar Conflict(2016) and Cross Tolerance(2017), the artist has delivered through the semi-abstract sculpture of the human body his thoughts on individuals and society, individuals and communities, relations and structure etc. According to the artist, he felt that certain tension developed when relating to society as an individual, having been reflected in his artistic work.
Contradiction and Link
Around 2010, Kim Nam Hyeon’s works took a turn in a different direction than he was previously going. By using urethane foam as his material, the artist included improvisation in his sculpture, thus getting surreal forms of the human body to appear in his projects. Referring to the period, Kim Nam Hyeon said that feeling overladen with relationships with others and different images of self, he adopted the relating people, that is, the semi-abstract form which could carry the artist’s symbols, emotions, interior topography and so on. Kim Nam Hyeon began to ruminate on the different looks that he or others take under the changing social circumstances. He also put the title of Familiar Conflict to clash between his original look and the alternative look that he discovered when meeting other groups. The Cross Tolerance series, created afterwards, has its materials which carry authorial symbolism such as roughly finished surface, grotesque-looking body parts, hair, and iron chain, as well as the title of the work, suggest the artist’s condition in which he had developed tolerance through a kind of balance created by the conflicts.
I want to take this occasion to confess that it was hard for me to find the correct reason, other than the artist’s personal orientation and experiences, for the reiteration of such wide-ranging concepts as individuals and society, individuals and communities, or relationships and that I couldn’t stop thinking that some link was necessary between the semi-abstract form of the human body which he expresses and the theme which he wants to discuss. Thus, the drawing which he created in relation to the Cross Tolerance series served as a big hint, for it showed in full view the fractal alignment of parts and whole, which I often heard Kim Nam Hyeon mention in our conversations. Fractal, as a term used mainly in science and mathematics, refers to the phenomenon in which endlessly repeating smaller structures create a similar-looking whole. Firstly, one may bring up his work Familiar Conflict in which small heads gather to make a big head. Thus, that a mathematical logic lies at the starting point for those apparently deconstructive sculptures, which seem to be totally unrelated to his structure, is crucial to grasp the essence of his works. Meanwhile, the presence of such a structure gives balance to the tension involved in meeting some other individuals and thereby minimizes it. Thus, in various locations, the fractal structure pretty clearly explains the face-off, meeting, expansion, reproduction, and connection involving individuals that were previously covered by the form, material, and medium of semi-abstract that the artist has all along spoken of.
Even if the fractal structure can establish connections between the form and the content of
his artwork, there remain questions. Why does his work with the various series assume many instead of one? Why should the single units, which constitute singular entities by themselves, be individuals of communities in Kim’s projects? Perhaps, it derives from Kim’s intention to endlessly face up to, converse with, and get reconciled with the afore-mentioned universal tension and anxiety. In conclusion, his work takes shape from what I(an individual), reserved as I am, feel, experience, and aim at while meeting with society. In other words, his work shows what begins as an individual spreading into a gigantic notion of society, and the artist expects his final form to be a creator and observer who builds a bridge spanned between them.
An excerpt from an essay written as part of the Advising Program of Gyeonggi Creation Center.