Burrowing at the Bottom of a Rainbow

Burrowing at the Bottom of a Rainbow is a solo exhibition of Hyun Nahm, a promising young artist whose sculptures manifest an unprecedented use of forms and colors, offering a flash of hope for the domain of sculpture that seemed to have expired. His work begins with exploring and examining contemporary junkspaces¹⁾, in which he discovers a new kind of vitality. Out of the materials such as polystyrene, cement, and epoxy that he finds analogous to the epidermis and subcutaneous tissues of urban architecture, he creates forms that conjure urban sceneries of our present and the future.

Hyun Nahm refers to his practice as “mining,” a process that contributes to his simultaneous deconstructing and renewing of the legacy of sculpture. It represents his will to reconstruct today’s digital-dominated world, which feels like a prison without bars although it gives an illusion that everything is possible there like a mirage, by working by hand with the materials that are regarded as junk. It is a will to create new sceneries by making use of the vast jumbles of resources and information about things ranging from history to consumer subculture. By taking a detour which involves the act of appreciation, he doubts what is the foundation that is supporting our reality, and dreams an impossible escape. 

His production process begins with making holes in blocks of polystyrene, a cheap industrial material known as XPS, with various tools. He pours other different materials into the holes, and after they have hardened, he melts and removes the polystyrene. Employing such a negative casting process, he not only presumes an unpredictable interior space, but also allows random deformations caused by chemical reactions among the materials. After the polystyrene is removed, the formation created by the free-flowing materials is turned upside down, to be presented as a freestanding sculpture evoking a spire or an urban landscape. 

In his Atog (2021), for example, conflicting images of the past and the future appear interacting with each other in a competing manner. As hinted in the title that spells “Gota” backwards, it specifically refers to Kazimir Malevich’s Architekton Gota (1923). While borrowing Malevich’s purist cubic forms, which addressed a possibility of verticality when horizontality was common in modernist architecture of Western Europe, however, Atog alludes to a dark dystopian future, far from a pure abstraction idealized by the Russian Suprematist. Painted in fluorescent colors, and having a rough surface created by the residues of air bubbles, it rather recalls vertical ruins portrayed in sci-fi animations. 

For Hyun Nahm, mining is a process that is both physical and conceptual as it refers to both his method of production and how he explores our environment trying to discover vertical structures that appear sculptural. He finds grotesqueness in the forms of telecommunication base stations, which are inconspicuously omnipresent across the country, and so consider them to be “contemporary spires.” In this way, not only does he recognize the physical body of the Internet, which invisibly sustains and threatens our contemporary life, but also turns the gaze of surveillance. 

Created with a will to evoke sceneries through sculpting, Hyun Nahm’s sculptures, even a small object put on a pedestal, have a power to awaken and arouse the viewer’s spatial imaginations about the universe. According to the sculptor, it is a state that can be attained through discovery, rather than representation, and through the notion of miniascape (縮景, “miniaturizing a scenery”) in Eastern gardening traditions. Like an enormous landscape consisted of fragments of weathered nature, Hyun Nahm’s sculptures are formations of chemical reactions of his materials and they evoke ruins of the future. The fact that he is also a member of a noise band interested in sounds of electric circuits and information technology, demonstrates his approach to sculpture. He uses matter, form, chance, and bricolage as means of perceiving reality and methods of artistic creation as well.



1) Hyun Nahm’s sculptures, which deal with architecture, urbanism, scenery, and geology among others, allude to Rem Koolhaas’ writing on Junkspace (2002), which demonstrates the architect’s keen insight into contemporary spaces. In this essay, Koolhaas devoted himself to diagnosing conditions of contemporary life, rather than referring to physical spaces. Thus, offering a theory on modern civilization, Koolhaas paid attention to contemporary spaces where architecture becomes a city by infinitely expanding its seamless and smooth interior spaces. In such contemporary spaces, conventional elements such as typical floors and absolute horizontality or transparency have disappeared; the only truth remaining there is continuous changes and unstoppable fluidity, which accumulate the archeology of morphings of layers of different eras. According to Koolhaas, these are the sites of capitalist ideology, where gradual expansion results in entropy rather than development, and where rupture and deterioration happen like unreported earthquakes, and there seems no possibility for humanity to escape from there. Rem Koolhaas and Fredrick Jameson, Jeongkeuseupeyiseu / Mirae doshi (“Junkspace / Future City”), trans. Yim Gyeong-gyu (Seoul: Moonji Publishing, 2020), pp. 9–53.

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Interview with Hyun Nahm

AHN SOYEON   Your sculptures on view are captivating, especially with the unusual details and unfamiliar colors that make forget any sense of déjà vu. They are hopeful signs for the current art world where it has become rare and skeptical to see a novel sculpting practice. To begin with, I’d like to hear your thoughts on creating forms by hand.

HYUN NAHM   The world we are facing today feels more difficult to grasp than ever before. Everything, even supposedly trivial or private matters appear to us after being mediated by some complicated abstract principles. So it takes a lot of time and effort for us to understand a phenomenon’s cause and effect, and in some cases, it is impossible to even try to understand.
      Manipulating materials by hand to create something is one of the most primitive activities of human beings, and this includes the art of sculpture. Sculpting requires many materials, tools, and cumbersome processes and procedures, and they result in an object with weight and mass that physically occupies a real space, so the viewers should move their bodies to experience it. And this is what makes sculpting more concrete and definite than any other acts.
      I hope to use such explicitness of sculpture, to reconstruct the world I am faced with, and to be able to see its essence more clearly.  

AHN   Your works are freestanding or are placed on a pedestal, thus apparently following the conventional exhibition format of traditional sculpture. But your works are exceptional in that they embody your desire to evoke scenery. Can you explain about your logic that sculptural objects can express sceneries?

HYUN   My idea to express sceneries through sculptures is derived from my interest in scholar’s stones (壽石, rocks resembling natural landscapes, traditionally appreciated and collected by scholars). In about 2017, by chance on the Internet I came across images of someone’s collection of scholar’s stones, and I found them very beautiful and mysterious. It got me to study about scholar’s stones, and that introduced me to the concept of miniascape (縮景) which I found particularly interesting.
      A term used in the art and practices of bonsai and rock garden, miniascape refers to a vast natural landscape miniaturized to be appreciated in a small room or garden. What’s interesting about it is the idea of miniaturizing here intends to ‘present’ a scenery in nature as a small-scale scenery, rather than to represent an existing landscape into a miniature model like diorama constructions.
      Even though it’s not artificially made to do so, a small stone can resemble a huge landscape, because the stone is made of the same components as the landscape that contains it and because they have undergone the same natural actions such as sedimentation, erosion, and weathering. I was deeply moved by the fact that a small fragment can engrave within itself the larger world to which it belongs by just following the principles of matter. I began to consider material properties of the things and phenomena occurring around me as principles of sculpting. I wanted to experiment whether the relationship between object and scenery and between part and whole can also be formed through sculpture.

AHN   Materials can be manipulated and mobilized as the artist intends, but you let your materials move arbitrarily through chemical reactions among them. How do you accept or make use of such arbitrary part of your production process?

HYUN   Although I use several different materials in my work, the main ones are polystyrene (Styrofoam and XPS board) and epoxy. Because of their advantages of being inexpensive and convenient, many other contemporary sculptors use these materials, and they are also commonplace industrial materials widely used in architectural constructions.
      In the beginning, I treated these materials like traditional sculptural materials; I would carve or cut into polystyrene and then apply other materials onto the surface, and I would cast epoxy as well. But quickly I lost interest in such methods. Polystyrene and epoxy are relatively modern materials which are less than 100 years old. I realized that carving, adding, and casting these new materials was only like replacing marble with styrofoam, and became skeptical whether that could bring about a form unique to that material.    
      I began to investigate material properties of these materials, and through various experiments I found that they melt, overheat, twist, or crack under certain conditions. In conventional sculpture-making processes, such occurrences would be regarded as failures and alternative materials or techniques would be applied to avoid them. But to me, they looked like the materials’ unique expressions, and I decided to make sculptures based on such expressions.

AHN   While it’s unusual to apply color to sculpture, you have gone further and chosen very unusual colors. Where do you derive them from?

HYUN   There are no strict rules for my color selection, but usually they are drawn from animations, games, live streams, and other images ceaselessly produced and reproduced on the Internet (the media contents with which I waste a lot of time). Some people call it “subculture,” but I think today there is no mainstream culture in opposition that can define a subculture as a subculture. Placed in an awkward position in such a situation, this culture is repeating boring, meaningless updates and mechanical expansions only. Amid overproduction and heated competition, they produce colors that are quickly and efficiently consumable—instant, unreal, excessively cheerful and childish, stimulating or harmful. 
      When I begin work, I first mix colors to emulate the color of a selected object. But in the subsequent process, chemical reactions among the materials cause discoloration and residual stains on the surface. Such a surface makes me imagine a far future where the things currently hovering before my eyes will have faded or decayed.
      However, the primary reason why I use color in the first place is because it makes explicit the process and structure of my production. My work employs a process that is a negative casting technique of sorts: I dig holes into a block of polystyrene and then pour epoxy and other materials into the holes. I can only roughly predict what the final form would look like until the polystyrene is removed to finally bring out the result.
      Pouring materials into the holes is conducted over several stages. If at each stage a different color is added to the materials, the final result shows—after the fact—in what order and in what ways the different parts (in different colors) were produced and reacted to the others (it’s like looking at a stratigraphic cross section).

AHN   It appears what you refer to as ‘mining’ is more than a sculpting methodology as a physical practice. It can be read conceptually as a practice of collecting and making use of references: references to art history, references to cultural or natural phenomena of specific regions, and references to contemporary society and popular culture. In conceiving the notion of mining, did you also consider the financial process which has been a hottest issue in recent years?

HYUN   It’s since working on The Cave that I began to take mining as my sculptural methodology. The Cave is a work I made for an exhibition held in 2018 at Audio Visual Pavilion. Around the time I was making works by folding and crumpling latex rubbers and then attaching printed images onto their surface.  
      Bitcoin had been a big issue when we were preparing for the exhibition. The news media, social media, and other online communities were all talking about the rise and fall of Bitcoin, so I belatedly began looking up about cryptocurrency. Looking into basic information about Bitcoin, I found especially interesting how the expression “mining” is used to refer to the processing of transactions in the digital currency system and how graphics cards are used as tools for such mining.
      Upon learning about cryptocurrency when I was making my final piece for the exhibition, I immediately decided to take it as a motif for the piece. I made a cave-like form with latex, and on the interior surface I put an image of a mining site lined with graphics cards, and on the exterior, images of animation characters, consumer products on display, and landfills. I also attached an anatomical model of teeth, and added a tiny miniature human figure in between two teeth so that it appears as if he is being swallowed up by a cave.
      After the exhibition at Audio Visual Pavilion, I began experimenting with new materials that have since become my main materials. When I was struggling with how to structure their unique materialities that I had figured out, The Cave came to my mind. The work provoked joyful memories of improvisations that went into it, but also led me to look back on whether there was anything I missed and what had motivated me to start the work in the first place. 
      The image evoked by the word “mining,” the scenery of a dark mining warehouse, filled with shelves of overheated devices operating, and the mysterious identity of cryptocurrency loomed over me once again. I felt a cave-like form was not enough to express such sensibilities; I decided I myself should mine and dig holes.
      Sculpting through mining is interesting in many ways. You can’t make a shape that you want and you always have to think backwards. Because your production process is invisible to you, you need to constantly doubt and imagine. The deeper I dig, the higher my sculpture will be. But if I get too greedy and overdo, something will burst, leak, or break.

AHN   You used to be in a band named Pink Business. What kind of music did you do? Do you think the band experience is connected to your work as a sculptor in any way?

HYUN   Pink Business is a noise band that was active from 2014 through 2017. I started playing guitar as a teenager, and during my college years played in several different bands. One day my rock-based performances began to sound very boring, and I got more interested in creating sounds than in music itself. I began making sounds with electric guitar devices such as effectors and amplifiers.
      Then, with the electronic musician Min Seong-sik, an old acquaintance, we formed the band Pink Business and it gave me opportunities to transform sounds into musical forms. We performed without a score or a plan. One of us would start making a sound and then the other would make a sound that would go with it. We improvised by twisting, building up, or deleting sounds. In such a process, the electric guitar is no longer an instrument for playing chords or melodies, but a material that can be scratched, vibrated, spilled, distorted, or smashed. To get more sounds, I also explored how different devices and sounds react to one another, maximizing the devices’ inherent material properties and modifying the ways in which they are composed and connected.
      I didn’t receive a formal training in sculpture. Nor did I have any knowledge or experience about it. So, once I decided to do sculpture, whenever I encountered unfamiliar materials or techniques, I approached them with the same attitude and sense as I had as a sound maker.

AHN   You often go out to look at mountains on the outskirts of Seoul, but you also have devoted yourself to observing telecommunication base stations, which are omnipresent across the city but are existing inconspicuously outside the people’s attention. Can you tell us why base stations draw your attention?  

HYUN   Base stations began to draw my attention when I heard the news about a series of arsons of base stations last spring. Many people in Korea are probably aware of those incidents. When the Coronavirus pandemic broke out, fake news spread in the UK and the social media that the virus spreads through electromagnetic waves from 5G base stations, provoking people to burn them throughout the UK and other countries in Europe. This is of course a ridiculous happening caused by some unfounded conspiracy theory, but it let me become aware of those structures for the first time in my life.
      After that, I was able to notice there are countless base stations in my everyday spaces that I pass by daily. It was surprising how such uniquely shaped objects had not captured my attention before then. Since then, I got a habit of looking out for base stations wherever I go. More and more I was attracted to their grotesque appearances, which are suggestive of the structures in cyberpunk fictions. It was also fascinating to find, just as plants have different appearances depending on the climate and topography, base stations take different forms and structures depending on the architectural environment and the usage and population density of the region. Base stations have become objects for appreciation for me. If I get to see a beautiful base station that catches my eye while I am walking or driving, I turn around to look and take pictures.

AHN   Can you share your tips on how to appreciate base stations?

HYUN   I can’t just pick up and take home a base station, but to look out for great-looking base stations feels as if stone collectors roam around mountains and rivers looking for precious stones. One of the first things you learn about scholar’s stones, if you study them seriously. is about the criteria for evaluating “famed stones” (名石). I began to think that I would need my own criteria for evaluating base stations as well.
      As I have complied, the aesthetic beauty of base stations can be judged based on four criteria: sharpness (尖), denseness (密), grotesqueness (怪), and shininess (景). To explain these in order, firstly, an excellent base station should give an impression of being sharp and pointed like a Gothic spire, and secondly, the denser the antennas and distribution boxes are clustered, the better. Third, an exceptional base station impresses you with its bizarreness, which may come from a form that’s slightly tilted, when it’s disguised with things like fake tree branches, or when two appear conjoined like twins. Lastly, because base stations are installed outdoors, if a station forms an interesting or meaningful relationship with its location scenery, it can be evaluated as a good base station regardless of its visual beauty.

AHN   You also take photographs of the base stations during your exploration. And in some of your photographs, a base station appears next to a church cross. What makes you find such a scene interesting?

HYUN   Just like base stations, church crosses are commonplace objects that are unusually soaring high into the sky. Because so many crosses can be found in our environment, it’s not difficult to find a base station appearing next to a church cross. When I see a base station installed near a church building or see antennas placed on a church roof, they remind me of pointed spires and gargoyle sculptures of Gothic architecture.
      The combination of these two is aesthetically impressive, but what’s even more meaningful is that they are both tools used for spreading civilization. In the distant past, a church building symbolized its power to oversee the community’s social order and culture, a power that separates civilization from barbarism. Today, the power that base stations have is comparable to that, because our life is dominated by the Internet and mobile communication technologies.

AHN   Base stations are to serve our convenience, but because they are also used for surveillance and tracking, they can often inspire conspiracy theories. Why do you want to ‘visualize’ such inconspicuous or invisible wireless communication equipment?

HYUN   The real threat posed by base stations is in their surveillance and tracking functions, not in whether electromagnetic waves spread the Coronavirus or cause cancer. Within areas where wireless services such as LTE and 5G are provided, information about who was where and when is recorded on the base stations, and collecting and using such information is technically possible, of course. In fact, in South Korea, it has been revealed to many people’s shock that during the 2011 Hanjin Heavy Industries strike and the 2013 railroad strike, the investigative agencies wiretapped and tracked whereabouts of the labor union activists and news media reporters. Also, following the COVID-19 outbreak in Itaewon last year, the government agencies were able to track down the visitors to the area by using the information recorded on the base stations.
      Being able to access network shares anywhere, paradoxically, means that you are under surveillance and control anywhere. Right at this moment, too, the base stations are watching us like Sauron’s Barad-dûr tower in the Lord of the Rings movie.
      To reverse this relationship, I thought it would be necessary to reimagine and transform the enormous network’s physical organs into visual objects for appreciation. Through appreciation, or, as long as we observe them, we can become the subject, not the object, of gaze.

AHN   Please tell us about your new series titled ATOG.

HYUN   The word “Atog” is the spelling backwards of “Gota,” a word from Arkhitekton Gota, one of Malevich’s architecton sculptures of 1923. In his essay titled “Painting and the Problem of Architecture,” Malevich explained horizontal buildings as “Alpha” and vertical buildings as “Gota,” and by using these concepts as basic units, analyzed the place of architectural form in the art of Suprematism as well as the characteristics of modernist architecture of Western Europe.
      For my “miniascape” series I was researching on previous cases in art history of sculptural expressions of sceneries, and that’s when I found about Malevich’s Arkhitekton Gota sculpture. It came to me as a vast urban cityscape of numerous buildings, rather than as a single architectural structure. The small sculpture on a pedestal was compelling an expansive sense of perspective and distance, which appeared to me similar to the art of miniascape which intends to lead the viewers to sense a larger landscape by looking at a small object taken from it. Furthermore, considering modernization had not yet sufficiently affected the Soviet Union at the time, Malevich’s sculpture evoked a tremendous scale that is not simply spatial but that implies a sort of utopian temporality. I found it so fascinating for these reasons.
      It got me to want to remake Malevich’s Gota in the same way I used to work on my “miniascape” series. The materials I had been employing, such as polystyrene, epoxy, and cement, seemed perfectly appropriate for this attempt, because they are like the epidermis and subcutaneous tissues of urban architecture of our time. While Malevich constructed Gota by piling up plaster cubes, I also chose to “pile up” polystyrene, but I made hollow holes, instead of positive masses, and fabricated them by using a negative casting process.
      Void was turned to mass, and not only the production process but also the resulting form was turned upside down. It would be apt to reverse the title as well, so I spelled Gota backwards and gave it the title Atog.

AHN   While your sculptures such as Atog and Miniascape associate natural or urban sceneries in the form or a tower with overlooking perspective, your photographic works suggest an opposite perspective as they take a close look at densely constructed minerals. Can you tell us about your interest in bismuth and why you have chosen the medium of photography for that subject?

HYUN   Bismuth crystals are reminiscent of shiny, geometric urban cities, and that itself is like a miniascape of sorts. But what really took my attention was how they are made. To get a bismuth crystal, you need to melt metals that look like ingot molds in a pot and then let it slowly solidify. The way in which it forms itself in a negative space appeared to me similar to the way I make sculptures by first making hollow holes and then pouring materials into them.
      Having myself made bismuth crystals in my studio, I would often just spend time looking at them closely, distracted by their colors and details. Scrutinizing a small city on my palm, I felt it would be like a satellite capturing images of the earth’s surface. The crystal’s physical size is very small, but what I saw in it was a very large scenery. Such a visual experience of size would be most effectively expressed through the medium of photography.