Yoonmi Nam is an artist born in Seoul, South Korea, and has studied in Korea, Canada, US, and Japan. Yoonmi received her MFA degree from the Rhode Island School of Design and BFA degree from Hong-Ik University in Seoul, Korea. She was awarded residencies at Mokuhanga Innovation Laboratory in Japan three times (2004, 2012, 2019) to study traditional Japanese woodblock printing techniques and is the recipient of the Keiko Kadota Award for Advancement of Mokuhanga. She has participated in artist residencies at Brandywine Workshop and Archives in Philadelphia, Frans Masereel Centrum in Belgium, Kala Art Institute in California, Vermont Studio Center, and a 3-year studio residency at Studios Inc. in Kansas City. Her work is in the collections of the RISD Museum, RI; Spencer Museum of Art, KS; and the Hawai’i State Art Museum, HI; among others, and has shown her work in over 20 solo exhibitions and 180 group exhibitions both nationally and internationally. Yoonmi is a professor of printmaking at the University of Kansas.
Project Statement:
During the residency, Yoonmi Nam will be making cast ceramic pieces made using various vacuum-formed packaging forms as molds. A collection of these objects will be exhibited at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City in a group exhibition scheduled to open in October 2022. Like many people during the COVID lockdown, Yoonmi and her husband stayed in their small house and relied on deliveries to sustain them. The daily deliveries, consumptions, and disposals of the packaging became a routine and the act of unboxing and recycling became a ritual. Yoonmi’s work has always dealt with the idea of impermanence, material culture, and the everyday. This new body of works continues that exploration while also investigating the formal elements of these objects and their materiality.