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Yoonmi Nam
08.01.2022 - 11.15.2023
H&R Block Artspace is pleased to announce a new Artspace Project Wall by Yoonmi Nam, a celebrated artist and printmaker based in Lawrence, Kansas.
Yoonmi Nam: Blizz is the inaugural project in a year-long series of partnerships pairing women artists and curators to create new works for this ongoing site for public art located in the cultural district of Kansas City.
For this project, Artspace Director Raechell Smith approached Yoonmi Nam with the invitation to consider a work for the billboard site and introduced the artist to Kansas City-based educator and writer Dr. Eleanor Lim-Midyett to initiate a conversation about the inspirations to be found in Yoonmi Nam’s work.
Their overlapping interests in contemporary popular culture, understanding the influence of traditional cultural practices like ikebana floral arrangement, and the consideration of the Asian American experience are explored in an essay commissioned for the occasion and published on the Artspace website.
Yoonmi Nam is known for her exquisite and precisely detailed lithographic prints which celebrate ancient traditions and contemporary techniques that blend eastern and western knowledge and practices. In an ongoing exploration of the still-life tradition, her elevated observations of everyday objects offer a poetic meditation on beauty and impermanence in works such as Blizz.
Yoonmi states, “I am attracted to the beauty, irony, and artistry of flower arrangements. The flowers, once cut from their roots, have only a short remaining time to live and then will quickly wither and die. But before they do, they are elegantly and elaborately arranged, as if time will stand still for them.”
According to Lim-Midyett, “this ephemerality is particularly evident through the peony flowers featured in Blizz, given the floral species’ acute sensitivity to the vicissitudes of spring rain and winds. Similarly, the Dairy Queen Blizzard container holding the blooms also has a fleeting purpose and is ultimately thrown away after a single use. While the repurposing of the container as a make-shift vase signals the theme of sustainability, the juxtaposition of the disposable container with the carefully arranged flowers creates a visual dialogue that reflects an attempt to create and preserve beauty in the context of an ever-changing reality, thus evoking the themes of impermanence and persistence.”
Yoonmi Nam is a celebrated artist and professor of printmaking at the University of Kansas. Born in Seoul, South Korea, Nam received her MFA degree from the Rhode Island School of Design and BFA degree from Hong-Ik University in Seoul, Korea. Her work is in the collections of the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, RI; Spencer Museum of Art, KS; and the Hawai’i State Art Museum, HI; among others, and she has shown work in over 20 solo exhibitions and 180 group exhibitions both nationally and internationally.
Eleanor Lim-Midyett, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Liberal Arts at the Kansas City Art Institute, is an accomplished scholar in the field of Chinese humanities and culture. Lim-Midyett’s deepening interest in contemporary artists and the vibrant regional art ecosystem has led to dynamic partnerships and the creation of public programs and meaningful conversations about contemporary art and culture. She received a B.A. degree in English literature from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and earned M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in East Asian languages and literature with a Concentration in Modern Chinese Fiction from Yale University.