Hwayeon Nam (b. 1979) has reconstructed historical records through observation and imagination, focusing on tracing and reinterpreting them in her works. In doing so, she captures the nonlinear intersection of historical and physical time, visualizing the waves of temporality that emerge within this framework through media such as performance and video.

Hwayeon Nam’s early works demonstrate experimental approaches, such as exploring the fundamental units of form—points, lines, and planes—through bodily movements (Delusion Beach (2008)), or reconstructing scenarios for performance by detaching linguistic signifiers from their meanings. 

The language and grammar of her choreography are loosely structured. Although the stage is directed by the artist, the loosely woven scripts encourage performers' free and spontaneous physical movements rather than enforcing meticulously controlled actions. 

For instance, in the performance video Operational Play presented at the Hermès Foundation Missulsang Exhibition in 2009, non-professional dancers were cast as performers. Following a loose script, they generated improvisational movements, showcasing the fluidity and openness of Nam’s choreographic approach.

Nam became intrigued by the phrase “Desert Storm,” which she came across by chance while watching TV news. She discovered that it was the codename for the coalition forces' airstrike on Baghdad during the Gulf War in 1991. This prompted her to collect various codenames formed through the arbitrary combination of ordinary words. She wrote these codenames on individual cards, arranging them to create a kind of scenario. 

The resulting scenario, Operational Play, composed entirely of these codenames, was developed into a performance. Nam crafted masks corresponding to each codename and assigned roles to non-professional performers.

This improvisational performance takes place in open outdoor spaces in two cities: Utrecht, Netherlands, and Seoul, South Korea. The artist distributed identical masks to performers in both cities. Each individual, using their own movements, interpreted the characters spontaneously, generating a variety of attitudes and expressions. 

The ambiguous script, composed of arbitrary words, was interpreted in diverse ways by anonymous participants, resulting in movements that varied widely. As these interpretations unfolded, the work evolved unpredictably, highlighting the dynamic and fluid nature of the performance.

Subsequently, the element of "temporality" emerged in Hwayeon Nam’s work. For instance, in Ant Time (2014), she regarded ants as performers operating in their own temporalities and recorded their trajectories. In Coréen 109 (2014), she traced the historical movements of the Jikji, Memory of the World Register, housed in the National Library of France, abstractly connecting the footage discovered along its journey.

Since 2012, Hwayeon Nam has been exploring the life and work of dancer Seung-hee Choi (1911–1969) through artistic projects that reflect her evolving thoughts. Born and active during the Japanese colonial period, Choi's dance and career embody the struggles of an artist navigating the tensions between Korea and Japan, tradition and modernity, and East and West. 

In Dancer from the Peninsula (2015), Nam focused on the period from 1941 to Choi’s defection to North Korea, examining the trajectory and legacy of her art. Nam approached Seung-hee Choi not as a historical figure but as an "artistic event," contemplating whether Choi's artistic journey could be reframed not as a past narrative but as an existential question posed to the present.

In Dancer from the Peninsula, Nam examines Seung-hee Choi’s artistic works and research process through a framework of outside forces, aspirations as an artist, individual will to survive, and multiple bodies that have split in the collision of two contrasting timeframes—both the imminent tomorrow and the remote future that her ideals were headed toward.

Hwayeon Nam’s research on Seung-hee Choi begins with the limited archival materials available, imagining a trajectory atop Choi’s incomplete records and images. One such work, A Garden in Italy (2012), minimizes Choi’s personal history and stereotypical representations, experimenting with a temporary and alternative archive that emerges and disappears through performance.

Hwayeon Nam’s work does not aim to empirically examine records of Seung-hee Choi or explain the creative process. Instead, it proceeds by circumventing and deviating from the actual gaps in the available information. A Garden in Italy similarly confronts the fact that very little remains of the documentation of Choi’s performance, other than the fact that it was performed in a theater. Rather than attempting to recreate the dancer Seung-hee Choi, the work reveals the impossibility of such a reproduction.

In the 2019 exhibition A Garden in Italy at the Korean Pavilion of the 58th Venice Biennale, the installation included a garden and interior structures resembling a landscape, along with Choi’s 1936 song of A Garden in Italy. Nam extracted a peculiar connection between the stage above and below from Choi’s theatrical records and transposed it into the third space of the interior and exterior of the Korean Pavilion.

Within the open structure of the Korean Pavilion, where the inside and outside are connected through glass windows, A Garden in Italy becomes organically linked to the video work Dancer from the Peninsula, installed inside. The work blurs the boundaries between the temporalities of the video and the present, subtly merging past and present.

The following year, Hwayeon Nam’s solo exhibition “Mind Stream” at the Art Sonje Center conceptually connected with A Garden in Italythrough the exploration of the inherent incompleteness of performance archives. The exhibition presented materials related to Seung-hee Choi, while also weaving together the works and archives Nam had accumulated over the years through her research and exploration of Choi.

As part of the exhibition, Ehera Noara (2020) is presented as both a live performance and a moving archive. The work is a reimagining of Seung-hee Choi’s 1933 piece Ehera Noara, which is known for its humorous portrayal of a woman dancing while wearing a hat and traditional robe typically associated with men.

Rather than attempting to faithfully recreate the original, Hwayeon Nam intervenes in the absent time and movement between the still images that remain, which are captured in a few poses. In Nam’s version of Ehera Noara, the female performer does not portray a male character, as in the original. Instead, she dances while sequentially vocalizing statements from critics, Choi’s mentor Baku Ishii, and Choi herself. The fragmented records of Seung-hee Choi are thus intertwined and reinterpreted through the performer’s body.

In her work on Seung-hee Choi, Hwayeon Nam focused on creating present events triggered by past materials, but recently, her attention seems to have shifted towards the future as a theme. In her solo exhibition “GABRIEL” at Atelier Hermès last year, the new works consisted of a collection of images and sounds that forecast and anticipate unknown events yet to come.

As suggested by the name of the archangel Gabriel, who announces the birth of new life or the news of war and destruction, the video work GABRIEL is filled with signs of events that have yet to occur. There is no narrative present; instead, it conveys the fear and awe of an unknowable future.

In her sound sculpture Coda, Hwayeon Nam modifies wind instruments to produce sounds such as an unknown rhythm of wind, the sound of instrument practice, and metal pipe noises. Through this piece, the artist imagines the movement of time as a vortex, where all sounds mix together.

The title "Coda" refers to the concluding section of a sonata, where previously heard themes are repeated, varied, and expanded. The placement of Coda at the entrance of the exhibition space suggests that the temporal trajectory in the artwork is not linear.

In this way, Nam traces the faint traces of existence left in the irreversible flow of time, making visible how these traces move and intertwine in the present moment. Her exploration of the relationship between movement and time leads to an investigation of the subtle motions occurring at the intersection of past and future, as well as a sensory examination of events and the surrounding time whose substance remains unclear.

"For me, work is a device that makes me move by meeting the external world." (Hwayeon Nam Interview, BAZAAR ART 2019 April vol.11)

Hwayeon Nam graduated with a BFA from Cornell University in the United States and an MFA from Korea National University of Arts. She has held solo exhibitions at various institutions both in Korea and internationally, including “GABRIEL” (Atelier Hermès, Seoul, 2022-2023), “Mind Stream” (Art Sonje Center, Seoul, 2020), “Abdominal Routes” (Kunsthal Aarhus, Aarhus, 2019), “Imjingawa” (Audio Visual Pavilion, Seoul, 2017), and “Time Mechanics” (ARKO Art Center, Seoul, 2015).

Additionally, she has participated in numerous group exhibitions, such as “We, on the Rising Wave” (Busan Biennale, Busan, 2022), “History Has Failed Us, But No Matter” (Korean Pavilion, Venice Biennale, Venice, 2019), “Reenacting History” (MMCA, Gwacheon, 2017), “wellknown unknown” (Kukje Gallery, Seoul, 2016), ”All the World’s Future” (Venice Biennale, Venice, 2015), and “Nouvelle Vague” (Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2015).

References

• 한국문화예술위원회, 제58회 베니스비엔날레 한국관 – 남화연 (Arts Council Korea, 58th Venice Biennale Korean Pavilion – Hwayeon Nam)
• 100.art.kr, 남화연 '점 선 면 X 인체 무대 언어'의 조합은 무한하다 (반이정)
• 아뜰리에 에르메스, 제10회 에르메스 재단 미술상 전시 (Atelier Hermès, 10th Hermès Foundation Missulsang Exhibition)
• 국립현대미술관, 남화연 | 작전하는 희곡 2009 서울 | 2009 (National Museum of Modern and Contemproary Art Korea (MMCA), Hwayeon Nam | Operational Play 2009 Seoul | 2009)
• 아트컬처, 베를린에서 한국으로 – 스크린으로 돌아온 남화연의 몸짓 
• 미술세계, 2019 베니스비엔날레 한국관 참여 작가 인터뷰 – 남화연 (장서윤)
• 아트선재센터, 남화연: 마음의 흐름 (Art Sonje Center, Hwayeon Nam: Mind Stream)
• OKULO, 흐름 위에서 되살리기 (강소정)
• 아뜰리에 에르메스, 가브리엘 (Atelier Hermès, GABRIEL)
• BAZAAR ART, 시간과 공간, 그 배회의 궤적_남화연 인터뷰, 2019년 4월호