Artists to Collect: Na Kim — How to Find the Self in Contact with Others

Untitled: 8, 2024 by Na Kim

It is usually assumed that finding and forming our sense of self is a deeply internal process. That we must first know ourselves well to feel confident, show up fully, and be in healthy contact with others.

Artist Na Kim looks at this process differently. And there is something important we can learn from her.

Kim was born in Seoul in 1986 and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Before gaining wider attention as a painter, she built a serious career in design, serving as Art Director of The Paris Review and Creative Director at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. In recent years, however, her painting practice has moved into sharper art-world focus.

Her debut solo presentation took place at White Columns, New York, in 2023. In 2024, she was included in The Selves at Nicola Vassell Gallery, and in 2025, Nicola Vassell presented Memory Palace, her first solo exhibition with the gallery. She has also shown at Art Basel Miami Beach and the Independent Art Fair.

This places Kim in an interesting position: still emerging as a painter, but already moving with serious institutional and gallery recognition.

Kim explores many themes, but today we want to focus on her Selves series, which is simply extraordinary. It consists of portraits of women rendered in bold, luminous colour where form is defined by contrast rather than line.

What makes her work compelling is not only her command of such complex colour relationships, though that alone is remarkable. It is her entire approach to portraiture.

Untitled: 6, 2024 by Na Kim

At first glance, it seems that Kim is painting herself, and there is genuinely some resemblance. But in her own words, this series is about “imagined personalities.” Through painting different states of a woman, she asks: how does personality actually form? How does a self come into being? Is it through actions, emotions, feelings? Through colour and form? What allows us to see ourselves more clearly — and to become visible to others?

And she seems to answer her own question: the self is not formed in isolation. It forms through contact.

Untitled: 14, 2024 by Na Kim

Kim’s figures always face the viewer. They shift in form, feeling, and mood, but they are always in contact with whoever is looking. Always in wordless dialogue. And we are actively drawn into it.

Not by drama, narrative, pity, or anger — none of the reliable triggers. And yet we stay.

Why?

Because we feel needed here. We become part of this woman’s inner process. She, even in a painting, requires our presence for something that is happening inside her. She does not ask, does not demand, does not manipulate. She simply exists and invites us to exist alongside her.

Untitled: 28, 2024 by Na Kim

This is Kim’s central idea: we come to know ourselves not only through our own inner experience but through the presence of another. Love, tenderness, fear, stubbornness, attentiveness, sadness — we feel these most fully as a resonance with someone who is looking at us. The feelings and reactions of the Other fill us and reveal what our own are capable of. More than we thought.

And that makes both of us more.

And perhaps this is the most important lesson of Kim’s work: the search for the self is not limited to the self alone. To be seen by ourselves and by others does not require action or performance.

Sometimes it requires only the ability to stay in contact.

Untitled: 8, 2026 by Na Kim