Notes on Na Kim: Memory Palace

Na Kim: Memory Palace

January 16 – February 22, 2025

“It is always someone that can at once be recognized and realized to be unrecognizable.” Was the concluding note I wrote about Na Kim’s inclusion in a previous Nicola Vassell exhibition. Each portrait seems to contain some natural antecedent: a posing model, a reference photograph, a mirror reflecting a face. Yet, as each work is scrutinized and discerned in its entirety, the semblance of recognition—the coherence of the antecedent—quickly dissolves into each painting’s microcosm of fleshy ambiguity. 

“The question is more how to make these women believable—and belief is another slippery thing" – Na Kim

Belief and reality are confounding and troublesome preoccupations. How do you believe in the unreal? How do you live in disbelief of the real? Kim’s work is notably more interested in the former question, but embedded in the first question is the latter. Much of our postmodern condition is wrapped up in believing in the unreal—value and hierarchy are the most unreal, abstracted apparatuses which organize every facet of how we relate to objects and others. This belief in the unreal, then, complicates the terms of reality, belief, and truth. Easily, this could turn into an endless essay on (un)reality, (non-)truth, and (non-)belief. However, focusing on Kim’s relationship to these concepts means returning to the question: “How do you believe in the unreal?” 

The title of the exhibition, perhaps, grants us an approach to this question: memory. We come to believe in something by our consideration of the thing’s relation to ‘truth,’ and we come to ascribe truth via relations of a certain set of conditions—one of the most important conditions is memory. What we believe in requires no discernible antecedent if it can appeal to the truth dependent on an establish memory: When we pick up a cup with liquid in it, we believe in it as a receptacle to hold and dispense water efficiently because memories of this occurrence have not convinced us otherwise. There is no need to prove a truth at every instance in order to believe in an object’s (or person’s) truth. 

Returning to Kim’s work, she has created a system of proofs that articulate a truth that can be assumed as inherent to each consecutive portrait. The deeper into the exhibition one travels, the more believable each portrait becomes. Each woman, distinct yet repeated, becomes an iteration of truth that bores herself into our memory, and in the beginning until the end, we are confronted with something so recognizable, yet so impossible to apprehend entirely. Each woman feels impossibly far away, like a memory, but is always looming over our consideration of the next. Again and again, Kim creates a microcosm of ceaseless beauty and terror—the beauty and the terror that is memory and (not) remembering.

Na Kim: Memory Palace at Nicola Vassell (138 10th Ave) from January 16 – February 22, 2025