Curated by Liz Kwon

 

Opening Reception: Thursday August 15, 6 – 8 pm

 

Gallery HO is pleased to announce the opening of a solo exhibition by Hye Yeon Nam, 

the winner of Gallery HO’s “2013 Open Call for Artists,” on August 15, 2013. Curated 

by Liz Kwon, Bold Movement reflects the artist’s exploration in digital media and 

technology. She works on interactive installations and performance video, portraying 

the struggles in coping with different cultures.

 

Her video work, Wonderland, was screened in Times Square in New York City (2009) and 

her work was also showcased in The National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution 

(2011-2012) in Washington D.C. as part of the group exhibition of Asian women artists. 

She recently had a solo exhibition at Telfair Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia. 

Gallery HO is pleased to introduce various works of Hye Yeon Nam in Bold Movement as 

her first solo exhibition in Manhattan, NY.

 

In her performance video, Hye Yeon Nam oddly performs and repeats simple, everyday 

behaviors. The artist seeks to represent her experience of immigration moving 

from Korea to the United States that even the simple tasks could become foreign. 

 

The installation, Self-Portrait, consists of four video projections, in which the artist 

presents herself eating with a stick instead of a spoon, drinking out of a cup that has 

a hole, walking in extremely big shoes and eating lunch on a leaning chair. Her work 

demonstrates how daily, commonplace behaviors could suddenly become strange and 

unfamiliar. Simultaneously, she attempts to show her feeling of displacement due to 

cultural differences. 

 

Hooray is an interactive sculpture composed of more than two hundreds human 

figures in double rows on the wall with a video on the opposite wall. When participants 

approach Hooray, the figures individually bow, as the participants’ shadows block light 

sensors and activate motors to cause the figures to move. The obedience of the small-

scaled human figures to the participants represents a hierarchical power relationship in 

our society and questions if we are living in a true democracy. 

 

 

Hye Yeon Nam BIO

Hye Yeon Nam is a digital media artist working on interactive installations, performance 

video, speculative design, and experimental games. She is a Ph.D. candidate at the 

Georgia Institute of Technology and holds an M.F.A. in digital media from the Rhode 

Island School of Design. She foregrounds the complexity of social relationships by 

making the familiar strange, and interpreting everyday behaviors in performative ways. 

Hye Yeon's art has been showcased in The Smithsonians National Portrait Gallery in 

Washington D.C. (2011-2012), Times Square (2009), the art gallery Eyebeam and The 

Tank, the conflux, the D.U.M.B.O. Art Festival in New York (2009), FILE (2011, 2012), 

SIGGRAPH (2008, 2010), CHI (2010, 2012), ISEA (2011), E3 Expo (2011), the Lab in San 

Francisco, and several festivals in China, Istanbul, Ireland, the UK, Germany, Australia, 

Denmark, and Switzerland. Her work has been broadcast on the Discovery Channel

(Canada) and LIVE TV show Goodday Sacramento, published in Leonardo Journal and 

featured in Wired, We Make Money Not Art, Makezine, Bussiness Insider, Slashdot

Engadget, and among other publications.