Kawah Ojol

ROH proudly presents Kawah Ojol, a solo exhibition by Hyun Nahm, the outcome of his residency with ROH from October 2023 through February 2024. This exhibition unfolds from Nahm's explorations across Indonesia, anchored in his exploration of two distinct yet intertwined aspects of life in Indonesia, its gig economy and volcanic landscape, which share an underlying precarity.

Hyun Nahm (b. 1990, Goyang, South Korea) operates at the intersection of material experimentation and alchemical process. His practice, grounded in sculptural transformations through chemical reactions, blurs the lines between the industrial and the organic. By combining contemporary materials like epoxy, jesmonite, and polystyrene with traditional techniques, Nahm’s works suggest terrains both familiar and estranged. These landscapes evoke the contingency of urban life through shifting states: melted synthetic foam coagulate into hardened masses, chemical resin stretches with a life of its own, boiling and cracking into forms reminiscent of cooled magma. Rather than a facsimile of nature, Nahm offers echoes of its processes—a dialogue with the forces that continually reshape the earth’s surface.

The exhibition itself is an invocation of these dynamic processes: fragile sculptures and installations hover between form and collapse, embodying a precariousness held together by invisible forces of gravity, melting points, and radio waves. Field recordings interlace these visual forms with a sonic landscape, drawing from his physical travels. These works attempt to materialise the unstable and imperceptible machinations of contemporary labor and an economy driven by network technology. Sulfur, a material with extremely delicate physical properties, performs across the exhibition as Hyun Nahm’s medium and analogy, building form through the force of magnetic fields. Kawal Ojol conjures encounters with the precarious existence of communities living near volatile geological faults, where daily life unfolds in the shadow of seismic unpredictability.

Born 1990, Goyang, South Korea
Lives and works in Goyang, South Korea

Hyun Nahm creates landscapes with sculpture. Experimenting with the properties of industrial materials such as epoxy, cement and polystyrene, and employing traditional methods like casting and modeling, Nahm portrays another modern landscape through his explorations of the concept of the miniascape—a scaled-down and independent sample of the natural landscape, reminiscent of scholar’s stones. The landscape that Nahm constructs is not based on any particular place or geographic environment, but is closer to a contingent and implicative scene made by variations in matter. As different materials entangle and melt into one another, or break open, they expand, ooze, and swell to create fragments of a landscape, much like magma. The recent Void Extruction series is an example of miniascape sculpture made in this method, and demonstrates a situation in which the emptied condition becomes, in fact, the solid.

Hyun Nahm received his Bachelor’s Degree in Painting at Hongik University and his Master’s Degree in Fine Arts from Seoul National University of Science and Technology both in Seoul, South Korea in 2016 and 2022 respectively. He has held a number of solo exhibitions, including Kawah Ojol at ROH, Jakarta, Indonesia (2024); Burrowing at the Bottom of a Rainbow at ATELIER HERMÈS, Seoul, South Korea (2021); My Early Adulthood Pilgrimage is Wrong, as I Expected at instant roof, Seoul, South Korea (2021); and Miniascape Theory at Art Space HYEONG, Seoul, South Korea (2020). He has participated in group exhibitions at a number of galleries and institutions in South Korea and abroad, including, among others, Wonderland at Lehmann Maupin, Seoul, South Korea (2024); Natural Born Odds at Salihara Arts Center, Jakarta, Indonesia (2023); The Hanging Gardens of Babylon at Nam-Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, South Korea (2023); off-site at Art Sonje Center, Seoul, South Korea (2023); Busan Biennale: We, on the Rising Wave, Busan, South Korea (2022); Cloud Walkers at Leeum Museum, Seoul, South Korea (2022); Geometric Organicism at Dorok, Seoul, South Korea (2020); and Faces at Museum of Art Seoul National University of Science and Technology, Seoul, South Korea (2019). Hyun Nahm undertook his first-ever artist residency with ROH in Bandung, Indonesia in 2023-24. His work is part of the public collection of Seoul Museum of Art in Seoul, South Korea.

ARTIST