K-Art at Home: Su Hyun Nam - 2020 Korean Media Art Series
WHAT: Virtual exhibition and artist talk
WHO: Multimedia artist Su Hyun Nam
WHEN: Release: November 6 at 6:00 p.m. | On View: Nov. 6 – 25
WHERE: Virtual Exhibition: KCCDC website at http://washingtondc.korean-culture.org
Artist Talk: KCCDC social media on YouTube and IGTV (@Koreaculturedc)
The Korean Cultural Center Washington, D.C. (KCCDC) proudly announces K-Art at Home: Su Hyun Nam, the third virtual exhibition of the 2020 Korean Media Art Series featuring works by Korean multimedia artist Su Hyun Nam that reflect the challenges of personal identity amid shifting digital and urban landscapes.
Releasing November 6 on KCCDC social media video platforms, K-Art at Home: Su Hyun Nam will feature five of the artist's multimedia works—Enacted Scene, Metamorphosis, Woven Milieu, Surrogate Being II, and Dis-integrated Memory—plus a recorded talk by the artist offering an added inside look at her creative themes, process, and inspirations.
Nam’s artwork presents a digitally woven landscape in which the coexistence of people and complex artificial environments is revealed through recompiled observations of city life. The abstracted scenes she portrays appear vaguely familiar at first, even pedestrian—quaint neighborhoods, urban skylines, and solitary trees—yet are distorted by swaths of manipulated pixels or shifting views spliced together. At times these fluctuations recall errors of digital imaging or stream buffering, other times the playful motion of rippling water or a kaleidoscope. Their effect, however, is the same regardless: these visual incongruities reflect our own real conflict with unnatural surroundings and social settings, as well as the challenge of interpreting what we see, particularly for immigrants such as the artist herself. Nam thus visualizes the true nature of an unstable symbiotic relationship between evolving technology, nature, and the identity of human beings living in modern society.
As physical installations, several of Nam’s multifaceted technology works integrate elements of motion capture and view tracking with feedback displays to produce live interactive art that viewers help create; for this virtual exhibition, viewers can experience recorded examples of these processes while Nam demonstrates the interactive components and their artistic significance in her artist talk.
The 2020 Korean Media Art Series allows the public to experience cutting-edge digital art during a time of limited in-person events, highlighting a diversity of works by accomplished Korean multimedia artists.
To watch the artist talk, click here
Artist Statement
My work investigates the complex emerging identity and implicit conflict of being foreign by reconstructing familiar landscapes as uncanny digital images. Living as an immigrant, I experience many incongruities in the seemingly coherent public world that arise from competing social norms and clashing cultural perspectives. In my work, technology becomes a means of understanding these intricate sociocultural relationships. By capturing moving images filled with the rhythms of an urban environment, digital media provides a virtual space for the free play of these various elements. I inscribe and imbue them into experimental video, interactive installations, or an experimental video game. Technology allows me to tentatively resolve the deep tension provoked by the divergent layers of my transcultural experience.
Negotiating my own existential dichotomy is one of my artistic goals, not only as an immigrant in the United States but also as a posthuman who co-evolves with machines. Digital technology, as a relative newcomer to the cognitive ecosystem, appears to permeate society in symbiosis with humans. For many immigrants, the tension of being different also lurks and lingers in their existence, as they are also perpetually subject to various forms of censorship. I contemplate this balance and my work opens it up to playful participation and self-guided exploration in an attempt to reconcile the underlying disintegration.
About the Artist
Su Hyun Nam has exhibited her work, including interactive video installation, 3D game art, and multimedia performances, both nationally and internationally, including at venues in Spain, United Arab Emirates, Greece, Singapore, the United States, and Korea. She explores relationships with digital media using an artistic and meditative approach to computation that transcends nationality. Her community-based media art projects were showcased at Burchfield Penney Art Center and Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center in Buffalo, New York, and her papers have been presented at SIGGRAPH Asia in Japan and the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) in Colombia. Nam earned an MFA in art and technology studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Transmedia at Syracuse University and a Ph.D. candidate in media studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo. For more information about the artist visit www.suhyunnam.com.