Natanal Hyun Kim [NEO]USA

Title of Piece: EYE/SEA
Duration: 1m 30s

Short Description
I SEE, these days we can’t do what we want but we will do what we need.
When you see the image of the globe you can realize that even if the world is big we are all connected through the ocean.

During the pandemic I used to walk on the streets of New York and I saw various people wearing masks. Even though I was able to see only half of their faces I could fully connect with their eyes. Once my eyes followed theirs I could see the story behind them. We could start to communicate through eyes without any word. Our eyes speak everything.

This experience gave me an inspiration to take pictures. I invited several New Yorkers to participate in my project. During the process of photographing them I realized that eyes are so magical – they can represent the earth, they can be watery and associate to an ocean, they can reflect all the emotions and thoughts.

All of my models have beautiful stories behind and my next step in this project is to focus on their eyes only and paint them.

Curatorial Note

In all its bizarreness, the pandemic left us exasperating silently. What remained was to look and be looked. The different blueprint that we are designed to be, the eyes essentially conveys the inner world, that which is sensed and perceived. The body language that is characterized by eyes constitutes the largest volume of our communication. Essentially the same essence shared with the character of water. Bringing together the amalgamation of the essence of both water and eyes together lucidly conveys the intended idea through the performance. And that even though the fear of pandemic has forced us to majorly cover up our sensory organs, yet there remains so much to communicate through the windows of our eyes.

Biography

Natanal Hyun Kim [NEO]
Natanal was born in 1983.
Natanal is an artistic director, choreographer and a visual artist, painter from South Korea, based in New York City. He is the artistic director and choreographer of Art Group Obang. Also he is artist by RH+Performing arts.
He interweaves the expressions of painting, sculpture, dance theatre, film aleatoric music, poetry, photography, video art, sound and character design.
He specializes in contemporary movement, contact improvisation, acting and singing. His movement is based on Korean traditional dance, which is strongly connected with breath control and the flow of the energy.
He has participated as a choreographer and a performer in various dance, film and musical productions in Asia and Europe. Natanal is currently working in different projects of performing arts & musicals in New York City. He is also part of the Nordic cultural program, whose objective is to connect artists from South Korea and Norway.