Nara Kim

Nara Kim is a visual artist based in Amsterdam, whose work navigates the spaces between memory, gesture, and the evolving materiality of image-making. Working primarily across painting and drawing, Kim reflects on the emotional and psychological weight of repetition—using acts of return as a way to process personal history and the passage of time.

His recent works revolve around a single, recurring photograph: an image of his partner’s back, taken during a shared moment while travelling. By repeatedly rendering this image, Kim explores how memory—like touch—can change through movement. Each iteration becomes a site where painterly language shifts subtly: the atmosphere thickens, strokes falter or intensify, colour reconfigures. The focus is not difference in form, but difference in feeling.

In this way, Kim’s practice becomes an embodied process, where the evolution of his own movement and body serves as both method and material. His paintings carry a melancholy presence: a gentle gaze, the meeting of light and flesh, a surface where intimacy and distance converge. These gestures, often small and slow, form a language of holding—where painting becomes a way to keep something from vanishing.