Poster image of 《Colorless People》 © Wumin Art Center

《Colorless People》 centers on The Story of Nam, one of Yoonah Kim’s new works developed during the pandemic, when she immersed herself in writing. The Story of Nam unfolds from the appearance of a person with the surname Nam and is set in a small village.

Told from a third-person omniscient point of view, the work explores fundamental questions about human existence and tragedy through a series of events, raising philosophical questions about life and death, as well as “presence” and “absence,” through the figure of Mr. Nam.

During the exhibition, spin-off stories featuring the characters—Miss Kim: A Side Story, The Elderly Couple: A Side Story, and Mrs. Cheongju: A Side Story—are presented at one-week intervals. Calmly revealing situations of interpersonal communication and the unconscious loneliness and emptiness concealed within the human psyche, her work speaks of a person who desires what is absent and becomes increasingly adrift the more impossible the object of desire is to possess.

Throughout her practice, Yoonah Kim has reflected on traces of human existence, solitary beings, lost memories, and inner absence. “Presence and absence” has long been a central theme in her work, through which she has given form to being and nothingness, life and death, harmony and disharmony, contradiction and compromise, deficiency and rupture, the instant and eternity, across multiple dimensions.

There is no hierarchy among them. Her work addresses in various ways the moment when something once believed to be certain suddenly disappears and existence itself reveals its own absence; the intensified awareness of absence that emerges when even the slightest desire is severed; the relative and dynamic relationship between presence and absence; and the intervals and gaps that become visible through that relationship.


Installation view of 《Colorless People》 © Wumin Art Center

Many of her works in painting, installation, and text are also drawn from the immediacy of her own lived experience. She does not embrace stale ideas detached from reality. While presenting life in its raw state, she also reveals in various ways that her own existence—or the many absences that exist but remain unseen—may in fact be profoundly ordinary.

For example, Good Citizens (2017–2024), made by soaking collected discarded clothing in porcelain and firing it, asks how human existence affects the environment and relationships surrounding it, and further, whether the continuity of those relationships remains valid once an existence loses its function.

From the position prepared by the artist, we exchange presence and absence, discover intervals, gaps, and islands, and read within them a parallel simultaneity. At the same time, we become aware of an “impossibility of intervention” that feels almost like fate, and encounter ourselves lingering helplessly around something we cannot quite reach.

In place of the artist, who attempts to intervene in “beings that cannot help but feel absent because they have not been granted a sense of existential value,” we maintain only a vague empathy with what is present. Yoonah Kim’s installations and paintings delve into precisely this point: the interval-island-gap that is at once piercing and porous, sharp yet infused with affection.

More precisely, they reveal, indirectly and at times through accumulated layers of pain and sorrow, the discontinuities between intervention in what is present and absent and the impossibility of such intervention. They speak, in other words, of a “hospitality toward pain,” received as something both sorrowful and beautiful.

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