Joseph Nam (b. 1991, Seoul) received a BFA from University of Hawaii at Manoa in printmaking. Working through a conceptual lens, he favors the look and feel of surfaces in all its splendid forms —canvas, paper, wood panel, video projections. Featuring paintings, prints, and drawings with various themes and methods, his work presents an orientation of the artist’s search, will, and contingency in the same space. To him they are ever-shifting like any psychological state, but ultimately aspire to describe a type of unity.
Each painting is individual, occasionally having a predetermined design, whereas otherwise improvised from the get-go. For Joseph, the act of painting is more than coloring, they’re indexes of action, reproach, and recording a moment in time. In creating a picture with tenets of representation and abstraction, each choice is a philosophical struggle between what the mind knows and what it sees.