The Botany of Desire

Nam Hwayeon
Born in Gwangju, South Korea, in 1979.
She lives and works in Berlin, Germany, and Seoul, South Korea.

Nam Hwayeon primarily creates stage performances and performance videos, but her subtly detailed drawings— which combine the forms of imagined defensive spaces and hierarchical systems in a way that is connected to her later video work—serve as metonym for the reality of human social systems, rules, hierarchy, and regulations. Her most recent videos and performances confront possible and impossible methods of experiencing the substantiality of things we believe to exist. Their subjects include the fragmentary archives of the legendary modern Korean choreographer Choi Seung-hee (1911–1969) and the physicality of such relics as the Jikji, a Korean Buddhist document dating to 1377, during the Goryeo Dynasty, considered to be the world’s oldest extant book printed with movable metal type. Though much of the two-volume work is now lost, the second volume is currently held by the Bibliotheque nationale de France.
In focusing on the impossibility of grasping the physical reality of such things, she raises questions about what it means to experience and understand times past and intangibles. In one recent work, Dimensions Variable (2013), she makes viewers aware of their own time and space as they watch the restrained bodies and attenuated motions of performers and dancers. The work is at once a difficult balance between measuring and perceiving space and time and a graceful performance that evokes beautifully restrained, formalist poetry. Nam’s choreographic approach to her videos, especially their dramaturgical elements, is the basis of their form and performativity. Together they represent a central guiding methodology attuned to the physicality and existence of objects, space, and time, and the figurative structure of social systems.
Her two-channel video The Botany of Desire, whose title is borrowed from a book by American author and activist Michael Pollan, intersperses the world’s first speculative bubble, the Dutch tulip mania (1633–1637), with the widespread stock market crash of 2010. The video orchestrates broadcast news of a recent stock market collapse, the heated noise of traders on the stock market floor, the sounds of swarming bees, the vivid colors of tulips deformed by viruses, and fluctuating stock market graphs. As these scenes dance across the screen—with intense sounds, vivid images of greed, and the rises and falls of immaterial graphs—the sound gradually disappears and empties out. Reminiscent of Karl Marx’s famous maxim, “all that is solid melts into air,” this video juxtaposes the speculative madness of the seventeenth-century tulip trade and today’s bizarre and ethereal financial markets. Creating an enriched video performance with a captivating rhythm achieved by the arrangement, composition, and organization of its individual scenes and elements, Nam renders visible the intense, human obsession with immaterial symbolic value.