Pictures of Faces: A Conversation with Na Kim
Na Kim in her studio. Courtesy of the artist.
Na Kim is a painter, a creative director at the publishing house Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG), and an art director for The Paris Review. I went to one of my favorite bookstores the other night to look at book covers she has designed. I picked up Minor Feelings, Cathy Park Hong’s 2020 book of autobiographical essays. The title is emblazoned in fiery orange block letters. The author’s name is blue-green. The contrasting color scheme is similar to one Kim sometimes uses in her paintings.
Kim completed her BFA in illustration and a minor in art history in 2009 at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore. From her studio in Brooklyn last week, she told me over Zoom that she looks at classical sculpture as visual reference to see how a person’s neck bends or how light falls when their head tilts slightly. I opened a library book to show her a reproduction of The Madonna of the Yarnwinder, a sixteenth-century painting attributed to Leonardo da Vinci. I put my hand over baby Jesus. He’s sitting in Mary’s lap, playing with a wooden dowel. Covered up, the composition looks a lot like one of Kim’s—the idealized woman, her hair parted in the middle, and behind her, hills descending to the sea.
In her studio, Kim was trying something new, returning to paintings she had previously set aside to see if now she can resolve them. She usually starts fresh, putting down a wash on a blank canvas, then, without too much preplanning, working quickly and decisively. When she gets a notification that it’s time for a meeting, she puts everything else on hold and hops online. The day we met, she was wearing a baseball cap turned backwards and a sweatshirt splattered with paint. I worked at MICA after Kim graduated, and we have a friend in common, so we had a good rapport, but I get the sense she has an easy time talking to most people.
Na Kim, Untitled: 33 (2024). Oil on linen, 16 x 12 in. Courtesy of the artist and Nicola Vassell Gallery.
Marcus Civin: Designing book covers, art direction, and making easel paintings are distinct enterprises. But I’m curious about the overlap. Do you see any similarities between your different pursuits?
Na Kim: It’s a sensibility of how I perceive an image in my mind. I’m isolating the image from everything around it. A lot of my covers boil down the book into a single image or object, and that’s how the portraits are, too. I think about how much information I want to give away in an image. That sensibility carries through from my design work into my paintings. How much information does someone need to process what they’re looking at?
MC: I think of you as a shapeshifter. There is still this idea out there of the artist being born whole cloth and only existing to paint. That single-mindedness works for some people but not everyone. I would like to see an exhibition of your book covers with your paintings. That wouldn’t offend my sensibilities.
NK: There’s such a stigma against designers or illustrators who want to make art. Most artists in the past have had day jobs, so I find the desire to make distinctions in such a severe way a little funny. But the two practices—or however many practices I’m doing—all have different purposes, and I think about them differently. What I learned from design informs how I paint, whether or not I want it to, and the same goes for what I’m learning through painting. It is going to affect the way I design covers moving forward.
MC: It seems like you’re someone who learns on the job, so to speak.
NK: When I first started in book cover design, I didn’t have any design experience. I didn’t take a single design class. I pretty much learned everything about it on the job. Back then, I had a big chip on my shoulder, thinking I wasn’t good enough or feeling like I didn’t understand design. That ended up being a strength for me. I was designing from a different perspective. I try to remember that as I’m painting now. Maybe it’s OK that I’m learning as I go without traditional education.
With book cover design, it’s all about how much is in your toolbox because, as you said, it does require shapeshifting. You have to bend the way you work to what the book needs. If I can hand-letter something, or I want a softer image—so a watercolor might be nice—I can do it myself rather than waiting for somebody else. I was talking to a designer at FSG the other day, and I was like, “If you want to take a class for anything… It could be glassblowing. It could be a stitching class. You should do it and ask us to reimburse you because all of those things will inform the way you design.” What if she does take a crochet class, and there’s a cover where she’s like, “You know, I could imagine the type being crocheted on this!” You know, that opens up the realm of possibilities.
Na Kim, Untitled: 1 (2024). Oil on linen, 60 × 48 in. Courtesy of the artist and Nicola Vassell Gallery.
MC: It sounds like you're a good boss! I’m hoping we can talk now in more detail about painting. I wonder, will you share the origin story of your current series of paintings?
NK: I’ve been wanting to paint for a long time. I originally went to MICA for painting. One of my first dreams was to be a painter. It sounds corny, but the beginning of the pandemic was such a disruption to our lives that it gave us a moment to reevaluate what we were doing. I started doing more work on paper. I’ve always done small drawings or watercolors, but canvas scared me. It was like, “I’m not good enough for this. It’s OK if I treat art as a hobby, if I just keep it in the notebook, then there’s no fear around it.” But the job at The Paris Review made me look at art a lot more. I was going to galleries constantly and doing studio visits with artists. It was inspiring. At the same time, I was dating a painter, and I would complain, “I want to do what you’re doing.” So, I took baby steps. I said, “I’m going to start with really shitty brushes, really shitty paint, and packs of pre-stretched canvases. And, I’m going to try that for a month. If I’m still doing it in a month, then I’ll let myself have some nicer brushes and paints.” And when another month went by, it was like, “OK, now I’m going to let myself buy a tiny foldable easel.”
After a few months, Matthew Higgs reached out about showing at the Independent Art Fair, which was a complete shock. All my insecurities came out. I thought it was a prank. That’s how flabbergasted I was. I met him through The Paris Review, and we never talked about my painting. I didn’t think it was appropriate for me to talk about my personal work. He just reached out to me quietly out of the blue, asking if I would want to show some of my work, and in a funny way, that’s when I hit the ground running. It’s almost like his believing in it gave me permission to take myself more seriously. And, that’s when I was like, “OK, let’s get some good paint. Let’s do this. This guy is giving me this chance. I don’t want to look foolish, and I don’t want to make him look foolish either.”
MC: Comparing your work now to the work you showed at Independent in 2023 and later that same year at White Columns, where Higgs is the Director, do you feel the work has changed?
NK: One distinction is that I’m playing around more with size now. I’ve also been playing around with more color, atmosphere, foreground/background, and figuring out where I can fit in pockets of abstraction.
MC: There’s water in your show Memory Palace at Nicola Vassell. Some figures appear to be standing in water or maybe on a beach. It seems like we could be seeing other figures or faces through water.
NK: I’ll lean into that if the paint takes me there. When I start a painting, I don’t think about making a scene look like the figure is in the water, but if it happens to go in that direction, sometimes I’ll let it become more apparent. It’s not premeditated. I give myself one freebie every four canvases or so. I’ll do three where I’m continuing what I was doing before, and then for the fourth one, I’ll let myself paint any way I want. Those are the wild cards. And they’re important to me.
I work wet-on-wet, intuitively, and I like seeing that in the work. In design, I have to focus on the details and make them perfect and clean. Whereas in painting, I can be a little more haphazard. I don’t want to make work that will be painful for me later.
Na Kim, Untitled: 5 (2024). Oil on linen, 30 × 24 in. Courtesy of the artist and Nicola Vassell Gallery.
MC: What do you mean, later? Like setting up a system for yourself that you won’t thrive in?
NK: Exactly. Part of me wants to do that, but I resist it. Instead, it’s about showing up every day and seeing where things take me. I think focusing on a single subject allows for that. The portrait becomes a vehicle. There is something very self-serving about painting. It’s the one thing I’m doing for me. It’s not about a client. It’s not about having to be anything other than what I want it to be. It’s exercising that freedom, which has been good for my spirit.
MC: Seeing similar figures repeat in slightly different scenarios creates a dream-like effect. If you follow someone like Carl Jung, memories and archetypes define the subconscious. Maybe it’s a ridiculous question, but what do you think feeds your subconscious?
NK: What doesn’t? I have vivid dreams, and if I get lucky, I can write them down. There is one I always think about because it was so good. This was in July 2024. I was in a place that resembled Capri with dramatic rock formations. Why was I dreaming about that when I’ve never been to Capri? Maybe it was because I was listening to Charli XCX a lot. In that one song, Everything is romantic, there’s a line about Capri. Did that go so deep into my brain that I dreamt about Capri?
MC: When you woke up, did you book tickets?
NK: No, I close my eyes and go there in my mind. How lucky am I? The dream felt like time traveling. I was wading in the water. People I knew didn’t have faces, but they told me, “You look so happy.” And I responded, “I am!” I couldn’t stop smiling the whole next day. I’m smiling, talking about it now.
MC: One might be tempted to put your work in a group show with artists working from observation—Alex Katz, for example, painting his wife, Ada, over and over again for many years. I would like to see a portrait of Ada next to one of your works, though the impetus is very different.
NK: I would love that too. I often think about how we see things and remember seeing things. What does something look like? When you’re remembering something, it’s not fully real. It’s an idea of what you think happened or you experienced. I’ve talked a lot lately about Ann Craven because we did a portfolio of her work for The Paris Review. She does these moon paintings, and, in my opinion, her paintings are more real than a photograph of the moon. How she sees the moon is more accurate to how I perceive and remember the moon. There’s so much more to an experience, object, or person than what it looks like.
Na Kim, Untitled: 17 (2024). Oil on linen, 24 × 24 in. Courtesy of the artist and Nicola Vassell Gallery.
MC: You insist that your paintings depict unspecific women.
NK: They are unspecific women, and I know you want to ask if they’re me because that’s what everybody asks. If you look closely at all the paintings, are they really the same face? And what makes a face different? If you saw my face next to one of the paintings, would it really look like me? Of course, it’s a part of me. I’m making the paintings, and if I’m creating a figure from imagination, I’m using my idea of what a face looks like. So, my idea of a nose probably looks like my nose. If you were painting a male face, you would probably include some of your features. Close your eyes. Picture a face. What face comes to mind? I think artists borrow from what they know. It would be impossible to say there’s none of me in this. It’s just what I know.
After I make a painting, I spend a lot of time looking at it, and I ask myself, “What is it about this one that makes it work or not work? Why does it have this energy?” Some of them go in the trash. Some of them sit. I don’t show most of them, but they all need to exist for the next one to exist. Going back to Alex Katz, I saw his Guggenheim show, Gathering, a couple of years ago, right before I started painting. That show was inspiring for me, seeing the chronology and his evolution through time.
MC: I was looking at the Gathering catalog right before we started talking and thinking how buttoned in, how stuck in their clothes his figures looked compared to yours. I wonder, for you, why nudes?
NK: It goes back to information. How much information do I want to share with the viewer in this painting? Where do I want the focus to be? If they’re clothed, then that’s information. It implies a specific time, place, or sometimes character. I’m stripping away that layer of information so the painting is open to being more.
Na Kim: Memory Palace at Nicola Vassell, on view through February 22, 2025, is the artist’s first solo show with the gallery.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
