Boding farewell to the Year 2022, Gallery BK Hannam will host its last show of the year, NA HYUN DRAWING, a solo show featuring Na Hyun from November 17 to December 15. Na fills the lapses existing in historical past incidents with his artistic imagination. In this exhibition, Gallery BK will present Na’s “documentary art projects,” collections of works, drawings, documents, and videos centered around his representative works.

“Taking documents and archives born by history — a field of absolute and objective truth — I perform an utterly personal alchemy to make a different edition of history. From time to time, due to my discarding of concepts of space and time, the beginning or end are turned ambiguous, at which point my editions try to escape from the conventional diachronic viewpoint that discriminates progress and result.  – Excerpted from Na’s artist statement

Na is interested in the significance and functions of ethnic groups and conducts projects that connect the past and present based on archives and records of historical incidents that are forgotten or in the process of being forgotten. Na’s documentary art projects are not only domestic and include various international projects. In his projects, Na analyzes historical incidents and their archives through a unique methodology he has crafted, including a survey of archives, interviews, making and installing works, creating photographic and video records, and visits to the site. Then, combining objective facts and his own subjective viewpoint, he reassembles the fragments he has collected into organically-structured projects.

These may seem disreputable and farcical, but they may also seem more diverse and neutral; most importantly, they do not impose themselves as objective and absolute truth. – Na Hyun

In his 1961 book What Is History? (1961), the British historian Edward Hallett Carr expressed that history is a view of the past through the eyes of the people in the present, emphasizing that those who write or interpret history in the present moment and their values have a critical influence over how the thoughts and lives of the people in the past are seen. In other words, history is not merely about discovering objective facts from the past. Instead, it concerns the entire process of evaluating and reinterpreting the facts. Na fills the lapses in history with objective facts he collected from archives of humanities, history, anthropology, and ethnography. Perceiving and surveying the past through his unique viewpoint, he reveals the circumstances that make up a past truth and intervenes with history to restructure the traces in time.

Na collects various documents and records and presents them in an open arrangement, but he does not use them to approach what their truth might be nor reach a conclusion. Instead, he urges each viewer to contemplate them through his own view and values. Also, in his presentations, Na transparently exposes the intentions he held over them, reminding viewers that the past is always vulnerable to deletion and brainwashing. Na’s works are born from converging records of the past and present into one moment, and we aspire to share the experience with visitors.