yoonmi nam

Taking Home With You

yoonmi — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 08:04:40 +0000

I was invited to participate in an event titled “Taking Home With You”, organized by Sang-Mi Yoo for the SGCI conference in New Orleans. This event will be on Friday, March 16th, 2012, 11:30am-4:00pm, at the Woldenberg Art Center (Tulane University) in Room 214.

Below is the project description of the event by Sang-Mi:

“New Orleans (2012 SGCI Conference location) is a city reminding us of the frequent history of natural disasters including the recent hurricane Katrina. Home is an important place for everyone as it provides us with a sense of protection and identity. Contemporary life often causes us move from one place to another as a result of many factors, including employment, family, education, war and violence, in addition to natural disasters. However, this transitory habitation may reflect how our contemporary lives are moving toward more nomadic lifestyles. The proposed panel will touch on the idea of home as well as positive thoughts on being nomadic or non-territorial. The home resides more within our minds than within the physical world.
In their work, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari describe nomadic space. In this model, one navigates the vast space through relationships between elements within the space. However, being somewhere is not restricted to being in a single place. Our body is always moving on. We are potentially at any place within the region. Everywhere becomes the place.
In this proposed event, each participating artist will bring prints of home. each print should have cutting and folding marks, allowing it to be cut and folded into a house form. the viewer is invited to visit the site, select a print, cut out the shape, fold it into a collapsible three-dimensional home and take it with them, examining the ideal notion of home and participation in a good cause. All of the proceeds from suggested donations will go to the American Red Cross to help out those affected by the recent tsunami in Japan.”

For this project, I focused on the ideas of transitory habitation and nomadic space that Sang-Mi addressed in her writing. I made a screen print with an image of a Korean high-rise apartment. It is in this kind of architectural structures that I grew up in when I lived in Korea. All of these apartments look very similar, with these pink/peach and yellow/cream color schemes. Two of the three different apartments that I grew up in, now no longer exists. They were both demolished and newer and even higher apartments were built in place of the old. When one folds and assembles this print into a three-dimensional structure, it will become a paper bag. I hope that these paper bag apartments will evoke the ideas of transience and impermanence, as well as a sense of transitory existence for the event participants.

This print is a 5 color silk screen print, printed on butcher paper. 4 color layers are printed on the front, and 1 color layer is printed on the back.

My student, Joshua Meier, assisted me with this project.

front

back

My Toile Wallpaper

yoonmi — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 00:31:06 +0000

I recently finished a lithograph for the Themed Portfolio that I am organizing for the 2012 Southern Graphics Council International (SGCI) conference in March this year. Here are some photographs from the process…

I decided to use the format of Toile patterns for my wallpaper print. I like how the Toile patterns are both sort of a landscape and a pattern. This was my first time making work using patterns, so it took me a little while figuring out how this works. Below is a photo of my sketchbook showing my process of trying to figure out the Toile patterning.

I realized that there are usually four sections in a diamond shape that repeats to make a Toile pattern. You can see below that I have a basic diamond pattern underneath the clear film that I was drawing on.

I used india ink and a nib pen to draw the image on Velvet Tone film. Once I completed drawing this one “unit”, I scanned this image, and printed out on several sheets of paper, and then placed it under the initial drawing on the Velvet Tone film, and copied it, repeating the pattern. I do the drawing on this clear sheet so that I can use it as a film for the photo lithograph. Here’s a picture of the photo litho plate that I made using the finished film.

And then… the finished prints!

And finally, I wanted to see how this Toile pattern would look when it is repeated.

In The Background

yoonmi — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 23:29:27 +0000

I am organizing a Themed Portfolio for the 2012 SGCI conference in New Orleans, LA. This print portfolio is titled “In the Background”, and all the artists that are part of this portfolio will be making a print that is inspired by wallpapers. There are 12 artists, including myself, and very soon, I will be getting all of their wallpaper prints to put them together into a bound book that will resemble a wallpaper sample book. I am very excited to see what all the invited artists will make for this portfolio. I will try to post the participating artists’ works as I get them, and will also post images of the completed portfolio itself when it is done.

Artists: Kristi Arnold, Katie Baldwin, Laura Berman, Teresa Cole, Christa Dalien, Kristina Estell, Adriane Herman, Mary Anne Jordan, Mari LaCure, Yoonmi Nam, Serena Perrone, Nicolette Ross

Resource for Artists

yoonmi — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 01:17:17 +0000

With the help of a grad student Jenn (see her wonderful artwork here), I have been working on a website that can be a resource for artists, specifically for faculty and students at KU, where I teach. I try to add all the calls for applications and artist opportunities that come my way. So if anyone has information that you would like to share, do let me know!

“Yesnomaybe” at the Lawrence Arts Center

yoonmi — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 17:47:20 +0000

I am very excited about our show at the Lawrence Arts Center opening this Friday, December 2, 2011. Last winter, in January, my friend Kristi Arnold, my husband Eric Conrad and I did a 3-week long residency at Frans Masereel Centrum in Kasterlee, Belgium making collaborative prints and drawings. We made 14 mixed-media drawing/prints and 1 stone lithograph print. The opening reception is at 7pm, and on Saturday, December 3rd, at 2pm, we are going to give an artist talk We will talk about our process of working together.

You can see all the works in the show on my website here.

New Website

yoonmi — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 05:47:20 +0000

I already have a website. So it’s not really a ‘new’ website, but I had to find a new home for my website. I had used Apple’s me.com to host my website until now, and I was very happy with it, but they will be ending that service in the near future. I don’t like to spend too much time building my website, so after looking at several of my friends’ websites, I decided to go with Virb.com. So far, I’m pretty happy with it. I really like that it is really easy to build the site, and I also like how clean and simple it is. Here’s a screen shot of the home page of my new website.

ME + YOU + ME at Wonder Fair Gallery

yoonmi — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 13:50:12 +0000

Eric and I are in a two-person show titled ME+YOU+ME at the Wonder Fair Gallery in downtown Lawrence. The opening was last night, September, 30th, and it was also the first opening of the gallery with the new owners, Meredith and Paul.

Click on the picture below to read the article about the Wonder Fair Gallery on Lawrence dot com.

Teaching Mokuhanga at KU

yoonmi — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 15:04:46 +0000

I am teaching Mokuhanga this semester at KU. This year, I started a website that can be a resource for my students. I just started building it, so there’s not much there yet, but I plan on posting photos, videos, info, links, and schedule updates for the class.

Here it is!

http://mokuhanga.weebly.com/

Yubara Onsen, Naoshima, and Tokyo

yoonmi — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 04:05:08 +0000

After the Mokuhanga Conference and visiting Mokuhanga studios in Kyoto, my friends and I did some sight seeing in Japan. First, we went to Yubara Onsen in Okayama and stayed there for two nights.

Train ride to Yubara Onsen

We stayed at Yubara-no-yado Komeya, which is a traditional Japanese-style inn. It had a small but beautiful indoor and outdoor onsen within the inn. Breakfast there was pretty good too!

Breakfast at the inn

In the town, they also had a free public outdoor onsen, which was pretty interesting. Both men and women bathed there together. I couldn’t take pictures when we were there, but I took this picture of an old photo of the onsen that was in a local restaurant.

Old photo of the public outdoor onsen

Then we went to beautiful Naoshima.

Naoshima

There are many contemporary art museums there. We only stayed for one night, and we arrived there in the early afternoon, so we were not able to see everything. But we were able to go to Chichu Art Museum, Benesse House Museum, and see a few outdoor sculptures. It rained the whole time we were there, but it was really worth making the trip. Tadao Ando’s architecture and all the artworks really complemented each other very well.

Soaking up James Turrell's "Open Sky" on a rainy day

There were a couple of Yayoi Kusama’s works on the island.

Yayoi Kusama from a distance

Yayoi Kusama in the rain

In Naoshima, we stayed in a Yurt!

Finally, we took the Shinkansen to Tokyo. One of the things that we did in Tokyo was to meet up with Keiko-san, who is the Program Director of the Nagasawa Art Park Artist-in-Residence. Together, we went to 3331 Arts Chiyoda, which used to be a school building, and now is a space for galleries, artist studios, and workshop spaces. Nagasawa Art Park office and gallery is also in this building. We saw some great exhibitions in the galleries there.

3331 Arts Chiyoda Building

Sato Mokuhanga Studio in Kyoto

yoonmi — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 05:38:24 +0000

After the Mokuhanga Conference, my friends Mariko, Katie, Helen, and I went to visit Sato Mokuhanga Studio in Kyoto. Sato Mokuhanga Studio is a professional printing shop that is run by the master printer Sato-san, and he has several printers working there.

Kyoko greeting us in front of the studio entrance

Mostly, they make reproductions of traditional Japanese prints, like the fan print that one of the printers is printing below.We had met Sato-san and two printers that work there, Kyoko Hirai and Makoto Nakayama, at the Mokuhanga Conference, and they had invited us to visit their shop. Kyoko is one of only two female printers in Kyoto. Kyoko was so generous with her time, spending the whole morning with us and answering all our questions.

Here are some images of the shop and Kyoko printing.

After the visit, we all went out to eat lunch!