In an increasingly loud and worrisome world, painter Na Kim is grateful to have an outlet—a metaphorical place she can go to reflect and ground herself. “Painting is a place of respite where the subject becomes my mantra,” she tells Observer. “Flow state feels a lot like meditation.” Since 2023, Kim’s daily practice has been focused on meditative serial portraiture in which she renders imagined figures over and over in pursuit of a platonic ideal. Think of it as the slow-motion, analog version of burst mode—though, as Kim puts it, her process is more like accretive carving, each repetition revealing something new.
Closing soon at Nicola Vassell in New York is “Na Kim: Memory Palace,” an exhibition of new paintings by Kim that marks the artist’s first solo presentation with the gallery. The more than thirty portraits in the show are stunningly beautiful, their subjects bathed in glowing tangerine light and gazing intensely out from their canvases at the viewer. Most striking are those in which Kim has placed her imagined subject in water. Suspended in liquid quiet, they feel like the literal embodiment of Kim’s meditations.
In them, we find an enigma we’re left to solve for ourselves. Kim’s dual explorations of the physical and the psychological offer ample space for intercalation—with no clues to situate them in a particular place or time, the viewer can engage exteriorly or interiorly, looking into her subject’s gently hooded eyes or gazing out through them. Wherever they are, it seems we’ve been there, too, if only metaphorically.
On the occasion of the Nicola Vassell show, Observer had the opportunity to ask the artist (who is also The Paris Review’s art director and creative director at Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux) about her painting practice, the power of repetition and how best to approach her quietly mesmerizing work.
“Memory Palace” suggests a deeply personal theme, but the works in the show feature imagined, idealized subjects—how do you reconcile that? Where does memory come into play here?
I don’t know that these things need to be reconciled. I’m fascinated by the idea and act of remembering–how honest or unreliable memories can be. It brings up unanswerable questions around perception—how many truths can exist at once. We’re all susceptible to being unreliable narrators, even to ourselves. As individuals, we inhabit the same time and space and, in remembering them, splinter into a million different directions.
Though the subjects of my paintings are imagined, the act of painting them requires me to remember them in order to create the next one. What is it like to have a memory of an imagined subject? How real is it? With each consecutive painting, do they move further away or closer to this idea of “truth,” and how far can they bend?
I was particularly taken with the expressions on the faces of your subjects, which to me are ambiguous: there’s boredom, intensity, melancholy. They’re looking at me as I look at them. Was that your intention?
Each decision, any sense of ambiguity, their task of perceiving and being perceived, and even accidents left, are intentional.
What role does multiplicity play in your work? A photo on your Instagram of many of these paintings laid out in a room together stood out. Is viewing these portraits together important?
I enjoy the different effects that these portraits have individually versus collectively. While hanging the show with Nicola, it was fun to play around with different arrangements and see the effect they have on each other. Together, they can work as a chorus or as a cacophony, but individually, their inscrutability poses a lot of questions.
The act of painting in multiples is freeing. It allows for more risks, and challenges me to dig deeper, to see more. I like the idea that we can never fully know something. That each revisit is justified, and with each consecutive attempt, you find new answers and questions.
How do you hope viewers engage with and interpret the work in the exhibition? Is there one specific piece in the show that serves as a key or entry point to understanding the show?
How viewers engage with or interpret the work is not up to me, but I hope they leave with more questions than answers. This body of work is an open-ended investigation; why limit it by defining it?
<