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Atelier Hermès in Gangnam District, southern Seoul, on Thursday.
The duo is holding the solo exhibition “Paranoia Paradise” at the venue.
Nayoungim, whose real name is Kim Na-young, defines their chemistry as symbiosis. Maass, on the other hand, was more of a romantic: “It’s about love,” he said. “I have a dark character, but Nayoung is very positive. So, we are very different.”
They consider themselves a good team because they complement each other through their differences, especially when it comes to their work process. Generally, they would begin a piece each doing what they are good at — for instance Maass welds and Kim embroiders — together to produce outlandish, enigmatic works that are based on a method they call “Frankensteining.”
The concept derives from Mary Shelley’s famed 1818 novel of the same name in which the titular mad scientist gathers stolen body parts from charnel houses or mortuaries and electrifies a monster to life. Likewise, both Maass and Kim collect random objects, like folding screens, coins, dentures and flyswatters, to combine them and give them a fresh breath of life as an artwork. They come in such different shapes and sizes, ranging from paintings, sculptures and large-scale public installations, that it’s almost impossible to categorize what the duo’s signature work is.
The “Paranoia Paradise” exhibition, filled with some 60 new works, emphasizes the duo’s comprehensive attitude toward art rather than the meaning behind each single piece, according to Ahn So-yeon, artistic director at Atelier Hermès.
Collectively, the works tackle the “hybridity and grotesque,” which were prominent concepts for the duo since they were students in the 1990s. They intentionally avoid “perfection” because it’s too easy to achieve, Ahn said. The difficult part is actually rebelling against deep-rooted social norms, which is why they strive for eccentricity.
“Flower Nap 1~4” is a major example on view at the exhibition that expresses this attitude. The piece is composed of four traditional Asian hanging scrolls embroidered with flowers that are each paired with a flyswatter. The irony lies in the contrast between the beautiful silk stitching of nature’s beauty that attracts insects and a tool that instead kills them.
“Pairing these two disparate objects shows that even in a paradise, in the case of these flowers taking a nap, there is bound to be an entity that causes disturbance, like the flies, hence a paranoia,” Ahn said.
The duo’s explanation behind each artwork exists like a separate, perplexing entity that cannot be grouped together into one coherent plot. During the press conference, Maass would mention that psychology is not a science, but a form of literature. He would also equate ugliness and beauty in terms of worth. And he spoke about how the duo aims to show as much as they can before pointing out, “But what we are really exhibiting is nothing, because there’s nothing in between the objects, but it’s a good nothing. It’s not like ‘nothing left to lose’ or ‘nothing to hope for.’”
Because much of the duo’s artworks are identified by the arbitrary components, they are generally defined as readymades. But Maass and Kim approach their pieces as postproduction, in the sense that they alter and put the individual objects into new contexts.
“It’s meaningless to try and invent something completely new in the present day,” Ahn said. “For these two artists, it’s about how you’re going to reinterpret an already existing object and give it a new purpose.”
The duo oftentimes does that with famous entities, like a chain of plastic pickles each with the face of American actor Nicolas Cage (they nicknamed it “Picolas Cage”), a canvas with a stitching of Minnie Mouse stained with coffee and a large-scale Hello Kitty sculpture that has two faces, front and back, like the ancient Roman god Janus.
The coffee stains on the embroidery piece, titled “Mini Mouse” (2020-24), was made deliberate to prove a point: that it’s real, as opposed to the beloved Disney character. The duo claims that she is not really a mouse, but an illusion.
“We [humans] project ourselves on an animal,” Maass said, giving an example through the shark. “We don’t like the animal side of the shark, but we like the aggressiveness of the shark. But we don’t like to encounter them.”
The same goes for Hello Kitty with the “Kitty Enlightenment” installation. Everyone thinks the character is a cat, but Sanrio has previously revealed that she's supposed to be a little girl.
Nayoungim and Gregory Maass, who have been working together since 2004 as an artist duo, are also a married couple. Call it what you want, but they refuse to be referred to as a “collaboration.”
“We do not collaborate. ‘Collaborate’ sounds like a word from the war,” Maass said during a press conference.
works by Nayoungim & Gregory Maass, ATELIER HERMES
From left: "Size Matters," "Roman Gentleman's Goblet,"
"By Any Means Necessary (Dionysus),"
"아미타불 Amitabha Buddha," "Good Riddance (FOKOF)" and "Bikini Bottom"
