Yoonmi Nam (b. 1974, Seoul, South Korea) is an artist whose prints, ceramics, drawings, sculpture, and installations explore the quiet contradictions embedded in everyday objects. Moving between traditional printmaking processes and three-dimensional materials including clay, glass, and paper, Nam focuses on things that are handled, consumed, displayed, discarded, and replaced. Disposable food containers, plastic bags, cardboard boxes, cut flowers, household objects, and other seemingly insignificant materials become vehicles for considering transience, memory, cultural identity, and the passage of time.
Born and raised in Seoul, Nam moved to the United States after completing her BFA in Printmaking at Hong-Ik University. Her experience of moving between cultures has remained an important undercurrent throughout her practice. Familiar objects can simultaneously evoke different places and systems of meaning, while materials associated with permanence and disposability complicate distinctions between what is valued and what is overlooked.
Still life provides an important structure for Nam's work. She has described the continually changing arrangements on a kitchen table—takeout containers, grocery bags, flowers, mail, and the remnants of daily activity—as temporary still lifes. These ordinary arrangements become records of human presence precisely because they are so fleeting. By isolating and transforming such objects, Nam asks viewers to reconsider the visual and emotional significance of things normally encountered without attention.
Nam frequently creates delicate ceramic versions of disposable containers and packaging, translating objects designed to be used briefly and thrown away into materials capable of surviving for centuries. Crumpled aluminum trays, takeout boxes, plastic containers, paper cups, and other remnants of consumption are carefully recreated in clay and porcelain. The transformation introduces a deliberate contradiction: objects associated with convenience, waste, and impermanence acquire the fragility, labor, and potential longevity of ceramics.
Flowers similarly recur throughout her work as symbols of beauty inseparable from decay. Cut flowers are arranged, observed, printed, drawn, and reconstructed in ways that emphasize their temporary condition. Nam's interest lies not simply in representing flowers but in the cultural structures surrounding their display—in particular, the human desire to arrange, preserve, and give meaning to something whose beauty depends upon its inevitable disappearance.
Printmaking remains fundamental to Nam's practice. She works extensively with lithography and mokuhanga, the traditional Japanese method of water-based woodblock printing. Her sustained engagement with mokuhanga has included three residencies at the Mokuhanga Innovation Laboratory in Japan, where she studied traditional techniques, materials, and processes. She received the Keiko Kadota Award for Advancement of Mokuhanga in recognition of her contribution to the field.
Nam's printmaking background also informs the way she approaches sculpture. Repetition, reversal, layering, translation, and the relationship between positive and negative form move naturally between her two- and three-dimensional works. Traditional techniques coexist with imagery drawn from contemporary consumer life, allowing historical processes to record objects that may otherwise exist for only minutes or hours.
Cross-cultural exchange appears throughout Nam's practice without functioning as a fixed subject. Korean, Japanese, European, and American visual traditions overlap with the global language of contemporary packaging and consumer goods. In her Toile works, for example, Nam adapted the repeating pastoral imagery of eighteenth-century French toile to depict contemporary urban landscapes and everyday surroundings. Elsewhere, traditional Asian printmaking processes are used to depict disposable packaging, while ceramic vessels reference both historical forms and mass-produced containers.
Nam has exhibited extensively throughout the United States and internationally, with more than 20 solo exhibitions and 180 group exhibitions. Her work has been presented in Japan, South Korea, New Zealand, Scotland, Germany, Belgium, Poland, Mexico, Bulgaria, Italy, Sweden, Paraguay, and throughout the United States.
At Haw Contemporary, Nam has presented the solo exhibitions Temporary Arrangements (2016) and For Now (2019), alongside her participation in group exhibitions at the gallery.
Nam's work is held in museum and institutional collections including the RISD Museum, Providence; Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence; Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art, Manhattan, Kansas; and Hawai‘i State Art Museum, Honolulu, among others.
Nam has received numerous awards, fellowships, and residencies, including a Solo Exhibition Award from The Print Center in Philadelphia; the Keiko Kadota Award for Advancement of Mokuhanga; a Hall Center for the Humanities Creative Work Fellowship at the University of Kansas; and the Ngawang Choephel Fellowship from the U.S. Department of State. Her residencies include Brandywine Workshop and Archives, Philadelphia; Frans Masereel Centrum, Belgium; Kala Art Institute, California; Vermont Studio Center; Studios Inc., Kansas City; and three residencies at the Mokuhanga Innovation Laboratory in Japan.
Nam received her BFA in Printmaking from Hong-Ik University in Seoul in 1997 and her MFA in Painting/Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2000. She has taught at RISD and Washington University in St. Louis and has been a faculty member at the University of Kansas since 2001, where she is Professor of Printmaking.
