Dig Lag Dig
When one thinks of Hyun Nahm’s work, it is often the brightly colored fragments of plastic that evoke his distinctive artistic language. Hyun Nahm, as is well known, adopts the concept of chukgyeong (縮景), a miniascape historically associated with practices such as suiseki, bonsai, and miniature rock gardens, as a methodological lens for his sculptural practice, which extends across diverse materials. Sometimes suggesting natural forms and at other times recalling familiar architectural or sculptural structures, these enigmatic works are linked to particular facets of the reality envisioned by the artist. In the
Note on Miniascape Theory (2020), the artist states that chukgyeong arose from the aesthetic desire of humans to enjoy the grandeur of natural scenery within small gardens or inside a room. What, then, is the desire that motivates Nahm to approach landscape through the methodology of chukgyeong?
The Cave
The Cave (2018) is an early sculpture work that precedes Hyun Nahm’s engagement with miniascape. This work departed from the artist’s interest in mining, a concern that later developed into his sculptural methodology. “Mining” was originally a word that referred to the act of digging into the ground to extract minerals and other subterranean resources. The Korean word chaegul (채굴) combines chae (採, to extract) and gul (掘, to dig). The term also serves as the translation of “mining,” which is derived from “mine,”. In contemporary usage, a search for “mining” yields results almost exclusively related to cryptocurrency.
According to the artist, The Cave is composed of an inside and an outside. Inside, it depicts a cryptocurrency mining farm, where the graphics cards are arranged in neat rows for mining digital currency. In contrast, the exterior imagery is somewhat chaotic, with objects of disparate scales and functions, such as animated characters, items in display cases, and landfill waste, intertwined on a single surface. Yet, imagining the process of folding and kneading the rubber latex reveals that these boundaries are temporary, allowing the interior and exterior to intermingle freely. When observing the human figurines scattered throughout inside a mouth-shaped cavity poised to engulf them, one realizes that this sculpture is simultaneously a cave and a human face, presenting a landscape of human desire that shifts with every change in perspective.
The artist once recounted being astonished by the ease of digital currency payments during a trip to China long ago. At a time when mobile payment systems had yet to take hold in Korea, the ability to pay effortlessly with a smartphone even at street stalls in China felt like a glimpse of the future. Returning to The Cave, one might speculate that the artist eventually grew weary of the hype surrounding Bitcoin. Everyone had a smartphone in hand, yet in a country where you still had to pull out your wallet to pay with a card, who was paying attention to the decentralization of digital currency or the innovations of blockchain? Most were simply intrigued by cryptocurrency as a chance to make a big profit without working hard, even if they didn’t have substantial funds to invest.
The Cave presents a landscape in which the artist perceives production and consumption to be entangled in time and space. Nahm envisioned the cave as an even more enigmatic place, where mining involved retrieving something unknowable from the dark and damp environment. His declaration, “I decided to dig a cave myself,” gestures beyond the making of a sculpture or the technique of negative casting. In the act of pouring material into unseen voids and awaiting chemical reactions beyond his full control, “mining” emerges as a conceptual device that frames the work.
The cave functions as a metaphor for the limits of Hyun Nahm’s own experience. However faithful his representation, what emerges remains tethered to his perspective. Nahm’s deeper resolution lies in recognising that the singularity of the artist’s view is insufficient, and that probing the abyss of an unknowable reality, using it as a mould, may constitute a more vital form of exploration.
Discovered Landscapes
Even amongst the niche enthusiasts and practitioners of chukgyeong, the appreciation of scholar’s stones is a particularly distinctive pursuit. Even stones artificially carved by water are considered scholar's stones these days, but in traditional principles only natural, unprocessed stones are regarded as true scholar’s stones. A stone is a small fragment of a rock, and all rocks are composed of minerals. Minerals are natural substances, crystalline in form with a regular atomic arrangement. Rocks are classified by their mineral composition, texture, and formation process. Rocks of the same type generally share similar internal structures and composition.
So, what then determines the quality of a good scholar’s stone? To a trained eye it is the outward display of inner structure in strikingly beautiful forms. Enthusiasts distinguish a stone’s qualities into four criteria: tu (透, porousness), jun (皴, wrinkling), su (秀, elegance), and su (瘦, slenderness). Through the practice of tamseok (탐석, stone-searching excursions), they seek out nature’s ready-made beauty to elevate it upon a pedestal. If chukgyeong is the discipline of miniaturizing nature’s landscape, to whom does this discipline truly belong?
To miniaturize a landscape is also to recognize oneself as inconsiderably small in relation to it. While producing sculptures in his studio, Hyun Nahm simultaneously conducted his own expeditions to collect a variety of these compressed landscapes. A year before his first solo exhibition, Miniascape Theory (2020), he went on a trip to China. It was around this time that the formations of Hyun Nahm's own ideas about chukgyeong were beginning to take shape. His short text Confucius and Miku (2021) reflects on the contrast between Shanghai Confucian Temple and Wenmiao Road. In China, he visited the Shanghai Confucian Temple, built in 1291 during the Yuan dynasty. After touring the temple, he encountered, just beyond its walls, Wenmiao Road, a Japanese subculture shopping district colloquially known as the Akihabara of Shanghai. In that moment, standing between Chinese tradition and Japanese modernity, Hyun Nahm was confronted with his own place in a geopolitical miniscape.
The Cave
The Cave (2018) is an early sculpture work that precedes Hyun Nahm’s engagement with miniascape. This work departed from the artist’s interest in mining, a concern that later developed into his sculptural methodology. “Mining” was originally a word that referred to the act of digging into the ground to extract minerals and other subterranean resources. The Korean word chaegul (채굴) combines chae (採, to extract) and gul (掘, to dig). The term also serves as the translation of “mining,” which is derived from “mine,”. In contemporary usage, a search for “mining” yields results almost exclusively related to cryptocurrency.
According to the artist, The Cave is composed of an inside and an outside. Inside, it depicts a cryptocurrency mining farm, where the graphics cards are arranged in neat rows for mining digital currency. In contrast, the exterior imagery is somewhat chaotic, with objects of disparate scales and functions, such as animated characters, items in display cases, and landfill waste, intertwined on a single surface. Yet, imagining the process of folding and kneading the rubber latex reveals that these boundaries are temporary, allowing the interior and exterior to intermingle freely. When observing the human figurines scattered throughout inside a mouth-shaped cavity poised to engulf them, one realizes that this sculpture is simultaneously a cave and a human face, presenting a landscape of human desire that shifts with every change in perspective.
The artist once recounted being astonished by the ease of digital currency payments during a trip to China long ago. At a time when mobile payment systems had yet to take hold in Korea, the ability to pay effortlessly with a smartphone even at street stalls in China felt like a glimpse of the future. Returning to The Cave, one might speculate that the artist eventually grew weary of the hype surrounding Bitcoin. Everyone had a smartphone in hand, yet in a country where you still had to pull out your wallet to pay with a card, who was paying attention to the decentralization of digital currency or the innovations of blockchain? Most were simply intrigued by cryptocurrency as a chance to make a big profit without working hard, even if they didn’t have substantial funds to invest.
The Cave presents a landscape in which the artist perceives production and consumption to be entangled in time and space. Nahm envisioned the cave as an even more enigmatic place, where mining involved retrieving something unknowable from the dark and damp environment. His declaration, “I decided to dig a cave myself,” gestures beyond the making of a sculpture or the technique of negative casting. In the act of pouring material into unseen voids and awaiting chemical reactions beyond his full control, “mining” emerges as a conceptual device that frames the work.
The cave functions as a metaphor for the limits of Hyun Nahm’s own experience. However faithful his representation, what emerges remains tethered to his perspective. Nahm’s deeper resolution lies in recognising that the singularity of the artist’s view is insufficient, and that probing the abyss of an unknowable reality, using it as a mould, may constitute a more vital form of exploration.
Discovered Landscapes
Even amongst the niche enthusiasts and practitioners of chukgyeong, the appreciation of scholar’s stones is a particularly distinctive pursuit. Even stones artificially carved by water are considered scholar's stones these days, but in traditional principles only natural, unprocessed stones are regarded as true scholar’s stones. A stone is a small fragment of a rock, and all rocks are composed of minerals. Minerals are natural substances, crystalline in form with a regular atomic arrangement. Rocks are classified by their mineral composition, texture, and formation process. Rocks of the same type generally share similar internal structures and composition.
So, what then determines the quality of a good scholar’s stone? To a trained eye it is the outward display of inner structure in strikingly beautiful forms. Enthusiasts distinguish a stone’s qualities into four criteria: tu (透, porousness), jun (皴, wrinkling), su (秀, elegance), and su (瘦, slenderness). Through the practice of tamseok (탐석, stone-searching excursions), they seek out nature’s ready-made beauty to elevate it upon a pedestal. If chukgyeong is the discipline of miniaturizing nature’s landscape, to whom does this discipline truly belong?
To miniaturize a landscape is also to recognize oneself as inconsiderably small in relation to it. While producing sculptures in his studio, Hyun Nahm simultaneously conducted his own expeditions to collect a variety of these compressed landscapes. A year before his first solo exhibition, Miniascape Theory (2020), he went on a trip to China. It was around this time that the formations of Hyun Nahm's own ideas about chukgyeong were beginning to take shape. His short text Confucius and Miku (2021) reflects on the contrast between Shanghai Confucian Temple and Wenmiao Road. In China, he visited the Shanghai Confucian Temple, built in 1291 during the Yuan dynasty. After touring the temple, he encountered, just beyond its walls, Wenmiao Road, a Japanese subculture shopping district colloquially known as the Akihabara of Shanghai. In that moment, standing between Chinese tradition and Japanese modernity, Hyun Nahm was confronted with his own place in a geopolitical miniscape.
Hyun Nahm’s My Early Adulthood Pilgrimage Is Wrong, as I Expected. (2021) is likely unfamiliar to many viewers. This small solo exhibition, held between Miniascape Theory and Burrowing at the Bottom of a Rainbow (2021), was conceived through a “pilgrimage” to Chiba, Japan, the setting of the animated film My Youth Romantic Comedy Is Wrong, as I Expected. Fascinated by the subculture of “location hunting,” in which fans juxtapose scenes from the anime with images of the real-world locations, the artist faithfully follows this practice in his work. The artist’s note which shares the exhibition’s title, casts a subtle critique of the audience’s repetitive interpretations, as they seek to endlessly produce an exact replica of the same scene. Employing the same ritual imitation, Hyun Nahm complicates his own critique.
The landscapes Hyun Nahm observes through chukgyeong seem to contain collisions of different times, much like the shape of a scholar’s stone encapsulating the layered transformations of geological strata over vast spans of time. This sense of clashing generations and incongruent temporalities is evident in the dated tone of the text in My Journey of BTS Appreciation (2020). Clearly informed by research into sources and literature on scholar’s stones, the text carries a composure, distinct from the past two travelogues. If the former voice resembled that of a stern Confucian scholar grumbling at the ‘modern ways’, the latter wanders leisurely— hands clasped behind his back, savoring the subtle winds of change.
The four conditions—cheom (尖, sharpness), mil (密, denseness), goe (怪, grotesqueness), and gyeong (景, scenery)—modeled after the four main qualities of scholar’s stones, represent Hyun Nahm’s attempt to read the information and communication technologies of the modern world as sculptural forms, as well as offering a way of enjoying the temporal ruptures he has discovered. The base station itself, transmitting signals that radically diminish physical constraints, already functions as a device that bends time.
Fugue
Have you ever wondered why some people are convinced that a celebrity on television is sending them signals, or why others believe a wiretap has been planted in their ear? Across eras and technologies, certain delusions are inseparably born from the communication systems of their time. While often described as “surveillance paranoia,” this term only suggests the effects rather than to the underlying cause. My own hypothesis is this: humans have a limited capacity for social interaction, and media expands that range towards excess. A vulnerable body is pushed to overload in such a situation, and through these expanded relationships, humans undergo transformational changes.
People who experience a condition known as Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity (EHS) report headaches, palpitations, fatigue, and other forms of pain. These symptoms are attributed to electromagnetic waves from electronic devices, though causality has not been scientifically proven. Various wireless devices in our daily lives emit small amounts of radio frequency (RF) radiation, yet most people wouldn’t describe being “exposed” to a smartphone.
Those afflicted with EHS describe experiencing discomfort even from these low levels of radiation and often use various devices to protect themselves. Some use readily available products like electromagnetic-blocking stickers, but many devise their own forms of protective gear, each as idiosyncratic as the variety of presenting symptoms. Information about materials and fabrication methods is shared through EHS communities, but the practices vary widely. Aluminium foil, the most common defence, is deployed in many ways, and the variations multiply when materials like silver, copper, or wood are employed.
It is only natural that Hyun Nahm, captivated by the ominous forms of cell towers, would take an interest in EHS. If stones that uniquely encapsulates the beauty of nature exist, is it possible that people too can carry within them, the landscapes of the world? In this sense, the hypersensitive individuals experience the effect of the environment in condensed form. Is it truly beneficial for everyone to be wirelessly connected, untethered from the constraints of physical distance and time? As technology advances and reshapes our surroundings, those unable to keep pace with the latest advances may struggle to identify the originating sources of the injustices they face. With this in mind, the protective equipment devised by EHS sufferers acquires a kind of validity, giving form to a reality that cannot otherwise be articulated.
A person who wants to hold a stone in their hands and spin it like a globe, as if it contains the world, cannot be called ordinary. Reframing the earlier hypothesis, one might say that any attempt to grasp the entirety of the world inevitably leads to overload. I have heard that Hyun Nahm is entering a cave for this exhibition, or, more precisely an abandoned mine; a tunnel once carved by humans for extraction, now exhausted of anything left to take. To record the passage from outside to inside through the electronic audio signals of an RF detector is, in a sense, a kind of negative casting using noise. If the signal travels from a cell tower all the way inside the mine, this may also be a form of time travel. I find myself thinking that the act of sculpting, by provoking chemical and physical changes in materials, similarly condenses the flow of time in a way that cannot otherwise be experienced. Knowing all this, I still ask, why then did Hyun Nahm enter the cave?
The landscapes Hyun Nahm observes through chukgyeong seem to contain collisions of different times, much like the shape of a scholar’s stone encapsulating the layered transformations of geological strata over vast spans of time. This sense of clashing generations and incongruent temporalities is evident in the dated tone of the text in My Journey of BTS Appreciation (2020). Clearly informed by research into sources and literature on scholar’s stones, the text carries a composure, distinct from the past two travelogues. If the former voice resembled that of a stern Confucian scholar grumbling at the ‘modern ways’, the latter wanders leisurely— hands clasped behind his back, savoring the subtle winds of change.
The four conditions—cheom (尖, sharpness), mil (密, denseness), goe (怪, grotesqueness), and gyeong (景, scenery)—modeled after the four main qualities of scholar’s stones, represent Hyun Nahm’s attempt to read the information and communication technologies of the modern world as sculptural forms, as well as offering a way of enjoying the temporal ruptures he has discovered. The base station itself, transmitting signals that radically diminish physical constraints, already functions as a device that bends time.
Fugue
Have you ever wondered why some people are convinced that a celebrity on television is sending them signals, or why others believe a wiretap has been planted in their ear? Across eras and technologies, certain delusions are inseparably born from the communication systems of their time. While often described as “surveillance paranoia,” this term only suggests the effects rather than to the underlying cause. My own hypothesis is this: humans have a limited capacity for social interaction, and media expands that range towards excess. A vulnerable body is pushed to overload in such a situation, and through these expanded relationships, humans undergo transformational changes.
People who experience a condition known as Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity (EHS) report headaches, palpitations, fatigue, and other forms of pain. These symptoms are attributed to electromagnetic waves from electronic devices, though causality has not been scientifically proven. Various wireless devices in our daily lives emit small amounts of radio frequency (RF) radiation, yet most people wouldn’t describe being “exposed” to a smartphone.
Those afflicted with EHS describe experiencing discomfort even from these low levels of radiation and often use various devices to protect themselves. Some use readily available products like electromagnetic-blocking stickers, but many devise their own forms of protective gear, each as idiosyncratic as the variety of presenting symptoms. Information about materials and fabrication methods is shared through EHS communities, but the practices vary widely. Aluminium foil, the most common defence, is deployed in many ways, and the variations multiply when materials like silver, copper, or wood are employed.
It is only natural that Hyun Nahm, captivated by the ominous forms of cell towers, would take an interest in EHS. If stones that uniquely encapsulates the beauty of nature exist, is it possible that people too can carry within them, the landscapes of the world? In this sense, the hypersensitive individuals experience the effect of the environment in condensed form. Is it truly beneficial for everyone to be wirelessly connected, untethered from the constraints of physical distance and time? As technology advances and reshapes our surroundings, those unable to keep pace with the latest advances may struggle to identify the originating sources of the injustices they face. With this in mind, the protective equipment devised by EHS sufferers acquires a kind of validity, giving form to a reality that cannot otherwise be articulated.
A person who wants to hold a stone in their hands and spin it like a globe, as if it contains the world, cannot be called ordinary. Reframing the earlier hypothesis, one might say that any attempt to grasp the entirety of the world inevitably leads to overload. I have heard that Hyun Nahm is entering a cave for this exhibition, or, more precisely an abandoned mine; a tunnel once carved by humans for extraction, now exhausted of anything left to take. To record the passage from outside to inside through the electronic audio signals of an RF detector is, in a sense, a kind of negative casting using noise. If the signal travels from a cell tower all the way inside the mine, this may also be a form of time travel. I find myself thinking that the act of sculpting, by provoking chemical and physical changes in materials, similarly condenses the flow of time in a way that cannot otherwise be experienced. Knowing all this, I still ask, why then did Hyun Nahm enter the cave?