Eight Cubic Meters by Nara Kim: Pickled Pickled

Nara Kim works from memories rooted in an unstable sense of place, blending them with imaginaries generated through attempts to bring these recollections into the material world. In this process, Kim inevitably confronts the distortion and manipulation of truth that is inherent to the act of recollection, allowing his practice to serve as a metaphorical vessel—a pickle jar—where these altered truths are both concealed and preserved.

After leaving home at sixteen, change became a constant in Kim’s life. The remnants left behind from these transitions have become a fundamental source in his work. Arriving at, and working through, paint as his primary medium only in the last 18 months, Kim seeks to remedy the diffculties in accuracy and precision that arise not just in the act of recollection, but also in the act of verbal communication. His work honours a certain relationship to the evolution of the self and functions as a way of bringing this self in complexity to others.

Nara Kim is a second year student of the Fine Arts department and was selected through the call for applications this academic year.