Issue 5, Profiles

Hyun Nahm

Flipping the World Upside Down

Words JEE YOUNG MAENG

Photography BORA KIM

Hyun Nahm begins his sculptures by listening to the sonic qualities of his materials. He creates flamboyant layers of irregular patterns with synthetic industrial materials like epoxy resin and polystyrene, derived from shapes of rocks or stones in nature and sometimes conjoined with architectural structures. Hyun’s works blur boundaries between natural and artificial landscapes. Not only do they resemble forms such as columnar joints or scholar’s rocks, known as viewing stones, but they also embody a sensation of time.

Even though his primary medium is sculpture, Hyun studied painting at Hongik University in Seoul in 2016 and recently graduated in 2019 with a master’s degree in fine arts from the Seoul National University of Science and Technology. Interestingly, he majored in painting as an undergraduate but had not created a single painting during his time at school. He felt painting on a canvas was less stimulating than music.

Hyun had started playing the guitar as a child and, in 2014, joined a noise band called Pink Business that was active for four years. He became more interested in sound rather than music and experimented by building up, deleting, and twisting sound to maximize the source devices of the sounds. He was never comfortable with traditional techniques or attitudes; instead, he intentionally experimented with or abused sounds, which often triggered accidental sonic by-products in surprisingly aesthetic ways. The ways he dealt with a sound influenced the selection of his artistic subjects and media. He made sound-related installations that connected him more with tactile sensation.

Although he never trained academically as a sculptor, his sculpting journey began when he started his master’s program at Seoul National University of Science and Technology. He was moved by a comment from his teacher, a prominent artist, and sculptor, Seoyoung Chung. After seeing Hyun’s sound installation, she told him, “If you don’t know the language of the objects you deal with, they start to talk nonsense.” He felt stunned at first by her words, and they have strangely resonated with him ever since. He started to investigate using the objects’ language to make noise, which inevitably led him to try transforming sound into a tangible form. However, developing a meticulous sculpting method differed from detecting tonal qualities in objects. This stimulated him to delve further into discovering the medium’s possibilities through using polystyrene, epoxy, fiberglass, and bismuth. He feels contriving a sculpture with these materials is like bringing sound to them.

Hyun’s sculptures absorb influences from the scenery of his neighborhood in Goyang, Korea, where he grew up and now lives and works. Goyang is one of the recently developed towns north of Seoul and is a popular commuter town similar to the one south of the city, Bundang. He has witnessed dramatic changes in this area since his childhood; land that once was a farm field seemed to become a construction site for high-rise apartment buildings the very next day.

Throughout the city’s gradual transformation, Hyun’s notion of “landscape” naturally changed. Today, even after more than twenty years of the new town’s development, the changes are still ongoing. Only a few minutes away from the residential neighborhood where Hyun’s studio is located are areas densely populated with warehouses full of used plastic products and electronic appliances to be recycled. Piles of plastic waste surround him like a cemetery. His current sculpture, placed outside the studio, adds an extra dimension to this bizarre scene. Miraculously, the sculpture becomes a marker of his world that houses the waste scattered around it.