Walking on the Mindscape – Paintings of Nam Kyung-Min
Bae, Myung-Ji (Chief Curator, Koreana Museum of Art)

Spaces of Symbolism and Allegory
Nam Kyung-Min’s inner landscapes show numerous repeated objects that trigger iconographical interpretation. The objects that appear in Nam’s paintings as visual archives, such as skulls, hourglasses, blown out candles, wings, butterflies, lilies and transparent bottles, not only have symbolic connotations, but also reveal multiple meanings that transform the works into complex and multi-layer mutual textual spaces. Furthermore, her objects refer to each other and cause association to lead spectators to free flow of consciousness. The objects of Nam Kyung-Min’s paintings, characterized by single and decisive absence of signifiant based on a context of duality, transform normal inner landscapes into complex space of allegory.

The allegorical rhetoric, which penetrates a different meaning in a given meaning, is revealed in the butterflies that float throughout the spaces such as the studios, indoors and studies. In Rembrandt’s Bedroom the butterfly is a metaphor of the artist’s soul, and of the illusion of painting. In the “Artist’s Studio” series, the butterfly is the feeble and delicate artistic disposition, and the flow of artists’ self-consciousness. It is a brilliant flight but a lonely and wretched state, and it is hope but an unstable scar. Sometimes the butterfly, which even triggers crudeness and fear in the empty indoor landscape, acts as a powerful mechanism of crossing over the border between reality and non reality, while it maintains an endlessly transforming rhetoric state.

– narrative bio
Nam, Kyung-Min Graduated B.F.A, Dept. of painting, College of fine arts, Duksung Women’s University (1997), and B.F.A, Dept. of painting, College of fine arts (1999) at the same College. She already has 8 times solo exhibitions at influential galleries in Seoul, Korea such as Gallery HYUNDAI (2010) and LEEHWAIK GALLERY (2006). She participated many group exhibitions and art fairs since 2005. She was awarded 6th Song Eun Art Grand-Prix, Second Prize (2006) and worked at Residency program such like Lee, Jung-Seop Art Musenm Art Studio 2th Residency Artist (2010.7-9), Young-Eun Museum Art Studio 6th Residency Artist (2006-08) and Goyang Art Studio 2nd Residency Artist (2005-06). Her art works are collected National Museum of Contemporary Art, BMW Group (Seoul, Korea), HANA Bank (Seoul) and Banyantree Hotel (Seoul) etc.

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