In an increasingly loud and worrisome world, painter Na Kim is grateful to have an outlet—a metaphorical place she can go to reflect and ground herself. “Painting is a place of respite where the subject becomes my mantra,” she tells Observer. “Flow state feels a lot like meditation.” Since 2023, Kim’s daily practice has been focused on meditative serial portraiture in which she renders imagined figures over and over in pursuit of a platonic ideal. Think of it as the slow-motion, analog version of burst mode—though, as Kim puts it, her process is more like accretive carving, each repetition revealing something new.
Closing soon at Nicola Vassell in New York is “Na Kim: Memory Palace,” an exhibition of new paintings by Kim that marks the artist’s first solo presentation with the gallery. The more than thirty portraits in the show are stunningly beautiful, their subjects bathed in glowing tangerine light and gazing intensely out from their canvases at the viewer. Most striking are those in which Kim has placed her imagined subject in water. Suspended in liquid quiet, they feel like the literal embodiment of Kim’s meditations.
In them, we find an enigma we’re left to solve for ourselves. Kim’s dual explorations of the physical and the psychological offer ample space for intercalation—with no clues to situate them in a particular place or time, the viewer can engage exteriorly or interiorly, looking into her subject’s gently hooded eyes or gazing out through them. Wherever they are, it seems we’ve been there, too, if only metaphorically.
On the occasion of the Nicola Vassell show, Observer had the opportunity to ask the artist (who is also The Paris Review’s art director and creative director at Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux) about her painting practice, the power of repetition and how best to approach her quietly mesmerizing work.
