Busan, May 8 – June 30, 2024, https://www.kukjegallery.com/
Na Kim is a well known Korean graphic designer who “made it” in New York. Capitalising on her fame in Korea, she now branched out into painting. The exhibits where classical acrylic-on-canvas or acryllic-on-wood paintings, taking up motives and assemblages from her scrapbook. One could clearly see the issue that occupy the artists mind, typefaces, logotypes, color scales, arrangements of graphical shapes, etc. Like in graphic design, every line and installation location seemed to be carefully thought through. But contrary to graphic design, there was no external purpose. What was on show was a self-refential system of shapes and connections created in Na Kims mind.
From a painting-technical point of view, I am guessing that most of these works were fabricated and not created by Na Kim. Especially in the case of canvas painting there was a bit of a discrepancy between the clean shapes and the not-so-clean execution of the painting itself (see detail of black paining). For a very clean result probably either a more senior fabricator would be needed, or maybe using a spray paint and stencil would do.
The Kukje gallery space at F1963 also deserves a mention. With sliding glass door on either side and L-shaped floorplan, it had a bit of a tunnel-feeling to it. Designed for high people throughput and not for someone to linger around for two long. In this sense, it was a rather unpleasant space to work with. There was not much investment into an artwork-specific exhibition architecture. Instead, similar to the standardized layout of a book or magazine, Na Kim made do with the available void wall space and used it as a canvas for her canvases, creating a meta-arrangement.
