Nam Tchun-Mo: From the Earth

One of the most significant abstract painters and leading figures of the generation that carries forward the Korean monochrome movement of the 1960s and ’70s, Nam Tchun-Mo presents his work for the first time in Portugal at Galeria Duarte Sequeira.

Born in 1961 in Yeongyang, South Korea, Nam Tchun-Mo currently lives and works between Daegu, South Korea, and Cologne, Germany. He inherited the language of Dansaekhwa, a movement that emerged among a circle of Korean artists working in reduced, often single-colour fields in the aftermath of war and under military rule, as they sought a distinctive visual language that was neither a Western import nor a nostalgic tradition.

While maintaining the fundamentals of Dansaekhwa, such as repetition, restraint and material honesty, Nam Tchun-Mo pushed this practice further, opening it toward sculpture and the process of construction. He builds his surfaces by pasting resin-hardened fabric into fine ridge-and-groove structures, arranging them into rhythmic lines across the canvas, then working the surface with acrylic colour. The result is a relief that both captures and reflects light: light and shadow move across the surface of the work as the viewer's position changes, so the work is never still but rather a continuous, shimmering surface of light. “I aim to use lines solely as relief, so that they embrace light and hold it in place as well as possible,” he says. “I do this by giving line volume. I am continuing to seek the transformation of light.”

Paint, paper, ink or fabric is worked, soaked, folded, pushed or scraped in repeated, near-ritual gestures, so the finished surface carries the record of the artist’s time and touch. Both the process and the result can be described as a meditative act of making. Nam’s work cannot be attributed to a single stylistic lineage. It brings together a myriad of traditions, artistic methods, a sense of handcraft, and spirituality, alongside personal memories that together shape a multifaceted body of work that is less something to look at than something to sit with.

The line, creating a sense of space and structure, together with the textured surfaces and sensorial qualities of his materials, sits at the core of the artist’s practice. Simple, sharp-edged furrows and visibly random fluffy fibres, contribute to a sensory and distinct oeuvre. Nam has also fundamentally transformed the boundary between painting and sculpture by using the natural environment as both his subject and his medium. Using the shape of the Sequeira residency grounds, he gave form to a new artwork from the series From the Earth. This process and method are familiar to Galeria Duarte Sequeira, which invited the pioneer of Land Art, Richard Long, to create an on-site sculpture during a residency in 1999, work that is still visible on the premises.

Nam grew up in Yeongyang, a remote, mountainous farming county in inland South Korea. The furrows of tobacco and chilli-pepper fields he saw daily from his family home became a visual and sensorial anchor for his art. The repetitive labour of accruing lines and imprints translates the passage of time onto the surface, effectively transforming each canvas into astratified record that seems to trace the trajectory of a life. Each line carries a memory, a bodily gesture and an architectural order.

Nam's body of work finds an unexpected echo in the land and coastal mist of northwest< Portugal. The terraced vineyards of the Douro Valley follow the same logic that shaped Nam’s own childhood landscape: land worked by hand, in repeated lines, over generations. The more untouched, atmospheric nature of the Peneda-Gerês National Park, together with the nearby Atlantic coast, adds another element his work hinges on: the shifting play of light and mist that he calls his “haze”. Together, these landscapes offer local visitors a familiar way into the Dansaekhwa movement.

Nam Tchun-Mo's exhibition also opens a dialogue in Portugal with another major figure of the Dansaekhwa movement, Lee Ufan, who will be exhibiting at Serralves Museum in Porto this autumn.