Namdoo Kim

Wesleyan Potters Artist in Residence 2024

Namdoo Kim was born and raised in South Korea.  He completed his undergraduate degree in Fine Arts focusing on glass and ceramics at Hong-Ik University in Seoul, South Korea.  Kim then travelled to the United States to earn his MFA degree at Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York in 2015. Kim completed his Ph.D. within the Glass Workshop at the School of Art and Design, Australian National University in Canberra, Australia in 2023.

Kim's work focuses on issues of consumerism and the sociological impact of object desire. He is particularly interested in how contemporary consumer values create social expectations and subsequent pressures, especially on young children in his home country. Growing up in South Korea, Kim experienced the accelerated Western consumerism in a developing economy, and the pressures that parents and children suffered as they tried to conform to the expectations of success, achievement, and the acquisition and symbolic display of wealth.

Kim's work challenges, through humor and satire, the pervasive and too easily accepted concepts of success and wealth. His art reinterprets the original meaning and purpose of obvious pop objects in our consumer society, visualizing them in terms of their underlying societal messaging, implications, and philosophies. The symbolism and references move beyond icons of pop culture, to examine and incorporate existing philosophies, interpreting them sculpturally in our contemporary context. 

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