​남 은 숙 Nahm, Eunsook

Landscape and I

Nahm Eunsook, in this reflective exhibition of hers, presents a total of 48 works produced since she moved to a small village in the township of Jipyeong in 2020. These works of landscape, other than being expressions of her new life in a new place, represent what she saw through the window of her studio in the course of five years.
 

Looking through the window, her gaze is fixed. Sitting in the same chair, she just looks straight ahead. What’s in motion is the world outside the window, which shows the continuous cycles of seasonal changes in all their intensity. Before this world of flux, she endures her own cycles of waiting. With each wetting of the canvas made of lightweight cotton cloth she waits. Until the surface is ready for painting. She spends a great deal more time waiting than painting, so she looks out the window watching while waiting. Her paintings may well be the products of all that accumulated time.
 

These paintings allow the viewer to experience not so much a two- or three-dimensional object, but something else as far as visual experience is concerned. It’s as if what’s visible up front disappears or goes past you when you come closer for inspection, like a fog or vapor. To recreate this particular effect Nahm chose the aforementioned cotton cloth. And she has learned, after many trials and errors, to manipulate liquid spreading behavior on the cloth in such a way that her works now verge on the sphere of visual uncertainty.
 

When it comes to the compositions of these paintings, many of them appear to be unstable, but this may be intentional, because it actually contributes to or enhances the experience of visual uncertainty. I see this as a sign of Nahm’s well-earned self-confidence and of her clarified sense of purpose. I also second her decision to group her paintings according to a theme, which she had never tried before. This new experiment has allowed her to do a single theme in slightly different ways so no single image has the final say.

Each image, therefore, becomes meaningful in relation to the rest of the group. Also interesting here is the role color plays. For what appear to be rather subtle dialogues between colors helps to alleviate the tension created by relatively forceful lines. Ironically, the weaker the color intensity, the stronger the group identity as a whole.

 

Nahm says that she can’t paint unless her mind becomes totally calm. She also adds that there’s nothing special about the scenery outside her window so her obsession about painting what’s out there may actually be about what’s inside of her. In other words, she seems to say, what she painted is the landscape of her mind. On the other hand, I wonder if that landscape can exist independently in her own mind without any reference to or relationship with the particular place and environment where she lives and paints. Can we not call that landscape, then, the one where both her mind and her land are deeply intertwined and therefore in-separable?

The landscape she painted may well be a symbol of her new identity, her membership as a living being of that land over which those blue skies extend their wings. In this sense, I’d like to think that this exhibition of hers will be remembered as an important turning point in her career. For she has found her new calling as a landscape artist in the true sense of the term.
 

Hongjinwhi
Water Deer Hill, Yeoju
Feb 28, 2025