Exhibition Text:

Nahyun Park is a Berlin-based interdisciplinary visual artist originally from South Korea. Since she started perceiving a borderline between the external society and herself, living as a female immigrant in Europe for 9 years, she has developed the desire for an ideal safe space. Such desire has made her explore a personal multi-nature inclusivity where collisional elements are “naturally” co-placed, by using symbols with certain meanings in extraneous places, or by exchanging properties of different mediums. For instance, when digitally creating, she mimics physical materials such as clay, oil paint, acrylic, watercolor, pen, fabric, paper, glue, etc. When physically crafting, conversely, handmade stamps are used to replicate elements in a manner reminiscent of ctrl+C/ctrl+V. 3D and outline effects from digital software are adopted. A recurring sensibility throughout her oeuvre which is analog nostalgia, melancholic cuteness is also a core part of the third space to comfort and emotionally hug the artist. 

The artist’s own formative language has been built as a liberation over normative graphic design regulations. She has worked as a graphic designer since 2014 and doubted conventional visualization rules such as composition, balance, sign, and rhythm, so on. Her works tend to subvert the rules in a sarcastic and surreal way.

Another recognizable trait of her works is detail-oriented description. This artistic methodology has come from doubting the substrate of efficiency in her personal experience with her career as a graphic designer where it is inevitable to mostly focus on visual priority, deadline, business results, and profit. She also questioned finitude and the hierarchical value between the “mass” digital printed material and the “unique” hand-crafted object. By adding labor-intensive craftsmanship into digital graphics, she blurred the boundary between design and art.