Since 2005 I have been working on black and white sumi ink drawings based on techniques outlined in traditional Chinese painting manuals. Although I was born and raised in South Korea, my art education emphasized Western art and art history. Only after years of living in America did I come to realize the importance of Asian cultural traditions. Since then, my work has been connected to re-exposing myself to my cultural history and re-teaching myself to paint using traditional Asian brush painting techniques. My desire is not to become a traditional painter. Rather, it is to use traditional techniques to express the sense of estrangement I have often felt living in Eastern and Western cultures. I am drawn to the transitional existence in which ideas and states of being cannot quite be determined to be this or that, but hover uncomfortably somewhere in between.
In my recent prints and drawings, I use images of man-made structures in transition as a metaphor to communicate transience and impermanence, and perhaps our desire for permanence and immortality. They are either in the process of being torn down, built up, or simply in some kind of a state of change. It may be due to time, neglect, development, or forces of nature. They are drawn from the everyday environment I observe in Kansas. I am using this imagery as a metaphor for myself as a person and an artist.
- Yoonmi Nam
“Her delicate architectural drawings depict structures in transition. Initially they give us the impression that the buildings are being destroyed by time, neglect, poverty or by forces of nature – tsunamis, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, and tornadoes. But as we linger over them we realize that perhaps these are not ruins but rather sites of construction. These unpeopled images become metaphors for impermanence. It is these transitional spaces that fascinate Nam as she continuously attempts to orient herself within one location.”
- Nadine Wasserman, Independent Curator and Freelance Art Critic
"In Yoonmi Nam's work we experience the world in small fragments. Bits of trees, birds, buildings, water, and land all seem adrift, caught in a small moment of time. That fragmentation represents the way we may perceive the world in which we live. Living bodies and personal encounters are often replaced by web-based text and images. Actual face-to-face conversations and physical gestures become increasingly foreign to us. On some days small isolated moments are all that we may encounter of the actual physical world outside of our offices and away from our screens and smart phones. That fragmentary experience of the world sits easily-or uneasily as the case may be-with how Yoonmi Nam experiences living in a place that is not her country of origin.
A longing for both the mythical and real home of memory and experience often pervades the work of transnational artists who experience their lives through displacement and transience. Living between two cultures, perhaps never feeling fully belonging to either, may leave immigrants feeling alienated from not only their country of origin, but also from their new culture. Basing her work on traditional Asian art-Yoonmi Nam has studied in Japan and has a keen enthusiasm for traditional Chinese painting-she discerns her cross-cultural experience through her work. The floating and illusive qualities of her images that barely seem anchored to the paper underscore ideas of displacement.
In her woodblock prints, lithographs, and Sumi ink on paper drawings, things often seem to fall apart. Small buildings of indeterminate use are broken as wood peels off of their facades. In some images structures seem either half finished or half demolished. It is almost impossible to know what stage the structure is in. We only know it is a fragment; pieces of itself barely held together. Stairs lead nowhere, or wood planks are waiting for someone to use them.
Yoonmi Nam provides no answers in her work, rather she suggests the confusing feeling of time having passed or stood still or something in between. And while the images have minimal color and line and are often very small on the expanse of white paper, they suggest a quiet, contemplative quality, as if we have missed something we needed to see or know, or we have come upon a situation just a little too late, or maybe years too late. For Yoonmi Nam the in-between physical and conceptual places, such as between Asia and America, are the ones she lives in and in which she interprets her life."
- Dana Self, Independent Curator and Freelance Writer