Artist: Na Kim

Nicola Vassell presents Na Kim: Memory Palace, an exhibition of new paintings by Na Kim, the artist’s first solo presentation with the gallery. The exhibition features a group of portraits that show Kim situating the genre within the structure of seriality to produce a sustained reflection on the intersection of appearance with representation and physical fact with metaphoric meaning.

These new paintings signal the continued development of Kim’s project of serial portraiture that began in 2023. Grounded in a daily practice of painting that Kim considers meditative, she began to portray “imagined subjects” derived from a platonic ideal in her mind, one she pursued and discovered anew with each successive canvas. A commitment to repetition allowed Kim to begin seeing the differences between portraits in a heightened way, such that previously minor or incidental details then appeared to become evidence of new emotional and psychological landscapes.

Just as the philosophical scope of Kim’s portraiture has become more complex, so too has her painting become more lush and lyrical. Whereas earlier portraits were placed against solid backgrounds of nearly monochromatic color, Kim’s new paintings are more open and spacious, with loose, sweeping brush strokes left visible for viewers to see both as atmospheric and representational detail. Kim has likened her painting process to that of carving, in that she builds her figures up slowly in an intuitive way that sees each new mark responding to the one that preceded it. This way of working allows her to achieve a subtlety of effect, as facial expressions seem to hinge upon slight inflections of shadow, line and color, so that the interior world of a given subject might be legible, but only just so, ultimately leaving us to draw upon our own emotional or psychological experience.

Kim’s attention to setting and atmosphere in these paintings can at times verge into complete abstraction, only further complicating our ability to trust what we first see in these portraits. Facial or bodily details that would otherwise seem familiar and easily recognizable, such as a nose, eyebrow or mouth, are instead transfigured by paint and mark-making so that we see them as form before illusion. Whether seen individually or considered collectively, these portraits ask us to examine our assumptions about appearance and presentation both in a physical and spiritual sense, to wonder if what we see represents what is really there.