Samcheong, Seoul
Nam Tchun-Mo
From the Lines
Leeahn Gallery"My work aims to reveal the scent that blooms in my heart, like 'the scent of azaleas.' This fragrance, beyond its clear materiality, seems to be expressed as a color emanating from transparency.” Nam Tchun-Mo has revived the memories of his childhood—such as the slopes and furrows of the fields in Yeongyang, North Gyeongsang Province, the soil and plastic sheets, and the sensations felt at his fingertips—through the formative language of “lines.” For the artist, the line is a flow of sensation, an act of accumulating time, and a structure that connects memory and space. His repeated act of drawing lines becomes a labor-intensive practice that evokes sensory contemplation, shaping a distinctive painterly world where plane and volume, structure and rhythm intersect. The materiality of Hanji further enriches his work, creating a subtle harmony between contemporary interpretation and traditional sentiment. This demonstrates how the artist has continuously explored new sensory possibilities through the evolution of materials, from his past works to the collages presented in the current exhibition From the Lines, all while maintaining the essential structure of his practice. This exhibition offers a renewed contemplation of the relationship between line and painting, grounded in the artist’s long-standing formal practice. The lines that compose the surface push and pull against one another, generating structure and rhythm upon a single plane. Through repetition and emptiness, the accumulation of sensation and density, the work invites the viewer to imagine the space beyond the pictorial surface.