The Story of Nam

A being of extraordinary beauty who captivates anyone, regardless of age or gender, at first sight; a morally flawless figure whose immaculate beauty makes others tremble for fear that their own shameful flaws might be exposed. Mr. Nam is perfect in every respect, even the scar on his face is beautiful. No matter how accomplished an artist may be, it would be impossible to capture all of his beauty in a single work.

Even the renowned painter Han, celebrated for his exceptional powers of depiction, claimed that representing him in a painting was impossible. This is how Mr. Nam is described in Yoonah Kim’s video work The Story of Nam.

We have long encountered such idealized beings throughout Eastern and Western mythology and history. From mythological figures of absolute beauty such as Apollo, the god of the sun, and Venus, the goddess of beauty, to celebrated beauties from history such as Cleopatra, Yang Guifei, and Hwang Jini . . . as well as heroes endowed with perfect strategy and courage, including Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, Joan of Arc, and Yi Sun-sin.

These figures are symbols and representations of absolute beauty and perfection created by humankind. They may be imaginary beings entirely different from the actual historical individuals. The artist introduces Mr. Nam as a “water ghost.” A water ghost functions as a kind of generalized excuse or pretext that conveniently explains a situation by erasing the individual stories and specific reasons behind each suicide.

In much the same way, the strange and grotesque events occurring in the village, events that are difficult to explain, are blamed on Mr. Nam. Whether or not he is actually responsible is irrelevant; the truth does not matter.

Just as Mr. Nam eventually fades from people’s memories in the video work The Story of Nam, becoming a figure of little importance, the perfect beauty, absolute ideal, or essence constructed by human beings can also prove hollow, collapsing and disappearing in an instant. An ideal or concept of beauty that once seemed eternal may likewise change and come to an end with a historical turning point.

What, then, is it that keeps us living? An unchanging and perfect ideal? Or an imperfect reality? Yoonah Kim brings us before questions of human existence. Existentialism challenged earlier modern Western philosophy, which had pursued ideals and essences, with the unprecedented proposition that “existence precedes essence,” turning attention instead toward life itself.

Even after ideals vanish into emptiness, the place where we remain rooted and continue to live is the real world, the harsh site of lived experience. Yet without ideals, could we endure the imperfections of reality? Only through the tension and variation between ideal and reality can we approach the true contours of life: dreams and hopes, despair and anger, happiness and tragedy, beauty and ugliness.

Near the end of the main section of The Story of Nam, the elderly painter Han suddenly finds the gaudy, multicolored neon signs of the nighttime street beautiful. Shuddering, he repeatedly says, “No, something this ugly cannot possibly be beautiful,” rubbing his eyes in disbelief. Having long revered ideal beauty, he finds it difficult to accept, yet this becomes the moment in which he recognizes the beauty and preciousness of imperfect reality.

In this way, through The Story of Nam, Yoonah Kim explores the relationship between “concrete, existential life in reality,” one of the central concerns of her practice, and “complete and universal ideals.”

Perhaps in order to contrast an unchanging ideal with the endlessly shifting reality of existential life, the lives of the characters in The Story of Nam, conveyed through subtitles, unfold through such dramatic turns and trials that even following the text can feel breathless. By contrast, the hanbok jeogori, apparently symbolizing Mr. Nam the water ghost, remains unchanged from the beginning to the end of the video.

Within the dark blue-green water, its ribbon ties flutter as it struggles upward before sinking again, repeating the same motion consistently throughout the work’s 18-minute-and-50-second running time.

Alongside the main version of The Story of Nam, which plays continuously in the exhibition space from the opening onward, the artist adopts an intriguing format in which three spin-off texts are released sequentially during the exhibition, one at a time. These texts delve more deeply into the individual lives of the work’s principal characters: Miss Kim, the elderly couple, and Mrs. Cheongju.

Like switching between wide-angle, telephoto, and zoom lenses, the work narrows its field of vision deep into the characters’ lives before shifting again between microscopic and macroscopic perspectives, emphasizing the specificity of human existence and exposing the realities of lived experience in an unvarnished manner.

This shifting between macro and micro perspectives on the world, as well as the motif of the whole and the individual, also appears in the tent installation All of Us.

All of Us

In the darkened exhibition space stand six tents. They resemble Native American tipis, but simply calling them tents would hardly convey the surprise and striking emotional impact of encountering them in the gallery. Red plaid shirts, striped T-shirts, faded jeans, beige sweaters, black lace, pink silk blouses, khaki workwear, polka-dot pajamas—countless fragments of clothing, too varied to enumerate, have been washed, dyed, and stitched together by hand to form these enormous tents.

They represent another expansion of Yoonah Kim’s longstanding practice with discarded clothing. Garments that might once have been worn by people of vastly different genders, ages, and occupations are sewn together and stand before us with a reassuring solidity and overwhelming scale.

Clothing inevitably becomes inseparable from the person who once wore it, to the point that we sometimes recognize someone by their clothes rather than their face. Through these fragments, the former owners of the garments are summoned into the space.

The enormous tents made from stitched-together pieces of discarded clothing create the illusion that those former wearers are linking arms, pressing their bodies together, and surrounding the interior of the tents. They become a metaphor for the microcosm we construct through solidarity without discrimination, community, and human relationships. As the title All of Us suggests.

Throughout 2024, Yoonah Kim cut and machine-sewed an immense quantity of discarded clothing to complete six tents. What she desperately brought to completion, despite repeatedly injuring her hands and straining her eyes through sleepless nights, may not have been merely six tents, but the community of all of us that she wished to protect.

Several months ago, U.S. presidential candidate Kamala Harris drew widespread attention when, imitating her mother, she remarked, “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” The phrase rapidly gained traction, increasing her visibility and spreading as a representative meme among her supporters.

It emphasizes community and solidarity by suggesting that everything exists within a context and that we are all connected. The unexpectedly enthusiastic response to the remark reveals a deep longing for community and solidarity.

From inside the tents come light, murmuring voices, the sound of snoring, and signs of human presence. They evoke an oasis in the desert, a field tent on a battlefield, or a church illuminated along a dark road at night. The light and sounds emanating from the tents call forth emotions such as human warmth, hope and expectation, and, on the other hand, an unfamiliar sense of fear.

The red and blue light radiating from the tents feels warm and sacred, like stained glass in a cathedral. It is the real world in which we live, intertwined and connected with one another, a world composed of flawed and imperfect yet beautiful microcosms; it is also the nighttime cityscape of neon signs witnessed by the painter Han.

Young people, older adults, and artists gather inside their respective tents and share their stories. Viewers can listen to the stories flowing out from the tents. We exist both inside and outside them. The structure mirrors The Story of Nam, composed of a main narrative and its side stories. Main narrative and side stories, macrocosm and microcosm. The tents are like small planets, gathered together within a larger universe.

Colorless People

The exhibition title “Colorless People” is not a commonly used expression. Conventionally, all races other than white people have been referred to as “colored people.” Yet white people are “white,” not “colorless.” The term “colored people” is premised on the assumption that whiteness represents a colorless, neutral standard or essence.

Through the term “Colorless People,” the artist exposes the white supremacy embedded in the linguistic habit of designating all races other than white as “colored.” At the same time, by using the expression “colorless people,” she reveals this contradiction and proposes a refusal to distinguish among people on such terms.

Yoonah Kim’s exhibition title “Colorless People” addresses not only race, but also all forms of social discrimination and oppression, including distinctions between men and women, rich and poor, privilege and ordinariness, and differences of class. The main narrative and side stories of The Story of Nam particularly contain critiques of gender discrimination and violence and oppression against women.

Yet the work extends beyond sexism and sexual violence to address the long history of violence and oppression, hatred and exclusion inflicted by human beings upon one another, and the tragedy of such violence ultimately returning to those who perpetuate it.

Yoonah Kim does not directly state or overtly display her affection for life and reality in her work, yet through her practice she warmly embraces the world we inhabit and speaks emphatically about human relationships, community, and solidarity without distinction.

Good Citizens

Since 2017, Yoonah Kim has continuously developed the ceramic installation Good Citizens, created by firing discarded clothing as ceramic. This distinctive method of combining used garments with ceramic processes emerged through repeated experimentation and research following numerous early trials and errors, eventually producing stable results and becoming a defining characteristic of Kim’s practice.

Discarded clothing is perhaps the object closest to its former wearer, retaining concrete traces and physical records of that person—their scent, sweat, surroundings, work, and actions.

When collected garments are soaked in porcelain slip and fired in a kiln, the original texture and form of the clothing remain as traces in the ceramic, while the garments themselves burn away and disappear. Good Citizens (2017–2024) is made by washing discarded clothing, folding it as one would fold laundry, shaping it, and then firing it as ceramic.

In this exhibition, Kim presents a new ceramic work made from discarded clothing, Layer upon Layer, Deep in the Mountains (2024), inspired by the form of clothes hanging on a wall. The garments are soaked in porcelain slip, dried so that they retain the form of hanging clothes, and then fired. Clothes taken off and left hanging by someone.

In the place where the owner has departed, the sagging garments evoke that person’s presence—the exhaustion of a long day, loneliness, and the unseen sides of life that others do not know . . . Multiple pieces of this ceramic work are installed across an entire wall of the exhibition space, forming something like a vast mountain range. Like us, living not alone but together in groups.

Through Yoonah Kim’s practice, discarded clothing undergoes a transformation in materiality and is reborn as an entirely new form of existence. The specific histories of the people who once wore the garments disappear, while the uniform texture and color produced by clay bring them into a shared visual unity. In turn, they are transformed into a universal history with which we can all empathize.

A universality of our lives and human relationships extracted from concrete lived experience. They are no longer his clothes or her clothes, but the clothes of us all. They become the lives of us all.

References

• [비평] 줌인 줌아웃으로 탐구하는 인간 실존의 문제
  [Critique] Exploring Questions of Human Existence through Zooming In and Out