Atelier Hermès is pleased to present Paranoia Paradise, a solo exhibition of the artist duo
Nayoung Kim & Gregory Maass, on view from November 22, 2024, to February 2, 2025.
Since 2004, Nayoungim & Gregory Maass(N&GM) have been collaborating across a
wide range of fields in a practice best described as omnidirectional. The duo’s ongoing,
diligent, and tireless endeavors include creating sculptures and paintings in their studio,
producing large-scale public installations, running a gallery as a project, publishing,
curating exhibitions, and organizing community workshops.
They are prolific, and every
exhibition they hold presents myriad forms(this exhibition at Atelier Hermès features as
many as sixty new works), providing visitors with abundant visual insights into their work.
Yet, intriguingly, a lingering sense that we don’t know much about the work remains.
High art and the commonplace, the past and the present, the cultural products,
knowledge, and tastes of the East and the West are intertwined as such in the world of
N & GM. These fusions can be interpreted as results of a cultural merger, a characteristic
of works made by multiple authors.
When the two first met in Paris, Nayoungim had
recently arrived from Korea – then still considered a distant Far Eastern country – after
studying art at Seoul National University, and Maass, originally from Germany, had
studied philosophy at Sorbonne University and then art theory at the Institut des Hautes
Études en Arts Plastiques, founded by Pontus Hulten. Both arrived in France with their
unique cultural backgrounds. Their paths converged at the École des Beaux-Arts. Some
delightful coincidences include the fact that Maass’ mother was a student of the painter
Günther Uecker and that Nayoungim’s father worked with artist Robert Filliou(when
Filliou was dispatched to Korea as a member of the UN reconstruction team shortly after
the Korean War). These form part of the many episodes that N & GM dramatize in their
work. In the life of these two who continue to communicate in French, a foreign language for both, cultural diversity quickly becomes an everyday occurrence.
The reason why work remains difficult for the audience despite the ample information
provided is not that the diverse components are difficult to identify, but rather that the
ways they are combined are very particularly distinctive. N & GM bring together elements
distant in time and space, disregarding their heterogeneity and thus fostering a sense of
dissonance. They pursue surprise rather than logic or beauty, often employing caricature
to provoke irreverence, which elicits ambivalent feelings of intrigue and discomfort in
viewers. Furthermore, the duo’s work titles, which resemble wordplay, further obscure
the messages or meanings. Far from the refined style or empathetic sentiment generally
expected from art, N & GM present to us a world of hybridity and the grotesque.1
The duo refers to their creative process as “Frankensteining,” invoking the mad scientist
who assembled a human part of corpses stolen from charnel houses and cemeteries,
then electrified it to life. Similarly, N & GM collect objects and ideas from various sources,
dismantle them, and reassemble them to create bizarre, unexpected results. Take, for
example, their work Kitty Enlightenment(2024), developed from a discarded Hello Kitty
sculpture they found in a park. The symbol of innocence had been abandoned because
it was dirty. N & GM “revived” it by cleaning it and filling it with warmth. They also gave
her a mouth – original Hello Kittys don’t have one so they can maintain their cuteness –,
allowing her to now convey emotions like joy and sadness. Bearing two faces like Janus,
this reborn Kitty reaches enlightenment or prajña.
The duo’s ceramic sculpture titled A rough day at the workshop(2022-24) depicts figures
lying down as if burned out after a hard day’s work (‘burning out’ here may allude to the
ceramic firing process). The piece also features cigarette butts, wigs, dentures, and
the early arcade game character Pac-Man, which can be interpreted as metaphors for
endless labor and the exhaustion that borders on near-death. One figure with a bundle
of pickled cucumbers shaped like intestines wears a tired-looking face of Nicolas Cage,
the Hollywood actor who is known to have taken on random commercials after his acting
career declined. This ceramic series was originally titled Hery Moorish 000, reflecting the
duo’s skepticism about the popularity of the 20th-century sculptor Henry Moore, known
for his widely admired abstract reclining figures with holes.
The Doctor Frankenstein theme is fitting here also because the human body is where the
subject’s vulnerability is exposed. In this exhibition at Atelier Hermès, N & GM present
several human anatomy diagrams, suggesting that humanity – when reduced to body
organs – is indistinguishable from metaphysical objects. With the inside and outside
reversed, there are ominous signals that internal forces such as sexuality, impulse, and
desire are about to surface. N & GM often incorporate motifs related to smoking and
alcohol, reflecting their interests in themes of individual freedom, passion, and stupidity embedded in such a culture of indulgence.
Foam follows Phallus 2.0(2024) employs a subtle wordplay, mimicking the modernist
motto “Form follows function.” Next to the phallus, depicted as a huge monument,
hangs an empty Chupa Chups container – a surprising discovery as the candy container
is shaped like a foamy beer mug! This moment of pleasure connects to a human body
bound by a sturdy, unbreakable chain. The human body, revealed as layers of organs as if
it were a three-dimensional computerized tomography scan, is slightly tilted and barely
held up by the hands of an adorable doll.
Since N & GM’s work focuses on the signification of objects, it can be understood
in terms of postproduction. The objects, images, and ideas that they employ are
always pre-existing cultural products, so their work is often described as readymade
or appropriation. However, it is important to note that N & GM always reprocess their
sources manually: they cut, add, paint, sew, weld, and utilize any of their other skills for
the desired outcome. In other words, these artists select cultural objects and then insert
them into a new context, as DJs sample and edit. This method allows them to reexamine
concepts of authorship and originality through recycling, and to explore the idea of
sharing – not owning –contemporary cultural forms.2
Borrowing elements from art history, I nailed it(2024) highlights not what it is cites, but
rather that the work has been accomplished successfully. This work reproduces and
references Picasso’s famous distorted human figures; but instead of using a brush or
paint, N & GM produced it by the act of nailing, a technique borrowed from Günther
Uecker, the German artist whose use of nails contributed to the development of Op art.
They also incorporated a golden rectangle, a motif associated with Kazimir Malevich who
pursued absolute flatness, thus emphasizing their intention to transform a traditionally
two-dimensional work into three dimensions. However, as they were absorbed in
hammering small nails, all complex thoughts went away. So, the exclamation “I nailed it!”
humorously overshadows all the piece’s references to art history.
N & GM produced two types of work from a found, old folding screen by separating its
frame from the embroidered painting. Evoking the formal experiments of the 1960s
French art movement Supports/Surfaces’, this process not only calls attention to the
flexible relationship between surface and frame, but also points to ideas long present
in traditional Asian art forms such as hanging scrolls and folding screens. Reborn as
a hanging scroll, Flower Nap(2024) contrasts a flower, a symbol of paradise, with a
flyswatter, representing anxiety or defense against uninvited guests, like flies. The idea of “Paranoia Paradise” is visualized as such.
N & GM’s work provides abundant visual information but resists a single interpretation.
This is because the artists employ objects and ideas not as vehicles of meaning, but as
elements that serve a purpose. For them, collecting old objects is nothing more than
sampling; it is gathering of fragments of memory. Since the meaning of these objects are
often related to personal memories or emotions, the artists and the viewers alike must
then create meaning based on their own experiences.
1 Hybridity and the grotesque were prominent concepts in the 1990s when N & GM were students. Related to Julia
Kristeva’s theory of abjection and Georges Bataille’s Heterology(1933), these concepts highlight the historical—and
often failed— attempts of by the ruling powers to exclude the inpure and heterogeneous. In 1996, based on these themes,
Yves-Alain Boix and Rosalind Krauss curated the exhibition “L’informe: mode d’emploi” at the Centre Pompidou, which
drew tremendous attention.
2 Korean translation of Nicolas Bourriaud’s Postproduction, published by Graphite on Pink, Seoul, 2016, p. 14.
3 Referring to the famous novelist Thomas Pinchon, who was so public-shy he once jumped out of his hotel room to avoid
reporters, what Gregory Maass describes as “luxurious paranoia.”
as a metaphor for an era where insufficiency persists, despite information overload. It
is a metaphor for the “world” where the artists, longing for the luxury of paranoia amid
objects, and viewers, curiously lingering in front of their artworks, encounter.3
