SangDoo Nam's homepage

Urban Flowers — 2026

For SangDoo Nam, art should intervene in people's lives and be actively shaped by them.
His installation Urban Flowers functions like a pop-up store: visitors are invited to share their
own story and exchange it for one of the displayed images. They may take the image with
them, while their story remains behind, becoming visible to everyone who comes after.
The wooden structure consists of 25 blocks, 20 of which are connected to form a "coin". At
first, images hang on the front and back of the blocks; through the exchange for personal
stories, they gradually disappear until all blocks are filled with the stories of visitors. The
process is inspired by the principle of blockchain, as used in Bitcoin or non-fungible tokens
(NFTs). SangDoo Nam translates this into physical space, combining architecture, painting,
coding, and artificial intelligence.
As the collection of personal stories grows and the displayed images continually change, art
becomes a social practice that makes a collectively generated value visible.

Urban flower look book — 2026

Edition 1/40

Status: Exchanged

Size: 16x12.5 cm

Edition 2/40

Status: Exchanged

Size: 15 x 13.5 cm

Edition 3/40

Status: Exchanged

Size: 14.8 x 12 cm

Edition 4/40

Status: Not exchanged

Size: 14 x 12.3 cm

Edition 5/40

Status: Exchanged

Size: 14 x 12.8 cm

Coin without thickness — 2025

Other — 2024

The flower of Nowness — 2024

„Kluge Sterne" aus „Ollea - Vier Gedichte von Heinrich Heine" von Aribert Reimann (1936-2024)

„Sehnsüchtelei" aus „Ollea - Vier Gedichte von Heinrich Heine" von Aribert Reimann (1936-2024)

Other — 2023

Das optische Unbewusste — 2022

A garden represents the harmony between the artificial and the natural, just as human beings embody a constant interplay between reason and emotion. This exhibition explores the boundaries and connections between the physical and digital worlds.

SangDoo Nam’s paintings combine geometric and fluid forms, reflecting the interaction between rational structures and emotional impulses in the process of creation. He considers these paintings as representations of the human condition within digital space.

Through a performance that brings the paintings into direct interaction with the human body, the artist seeks to translate this digital human condition back into physical reality. Different combinations of body, painting, and movement create a constantly shifting relationship between the virtual and the real, reason and emotion, and the artificial and the natural.

Other — 2022

Schatten von Regenbogen — 2022

This project explores an artistic concept that brings together technology, painting, and the botanical garden to create an immersive experience for the viewer. It seeks to blur the boundary between reality and illusion through a large-scale painting that responds to physical and environmental conditions, gradually revealing only the threads within its frame.

The rainbow serves as a metaphor for illusion—something visible yet intangible, appearing only under particular conditions. In the same way, sunlight becomes an essential element of the work, allowing it to be fully experienced.

Through this interplay of material, light, technology, and environment, the project explores the shifting relationship between art, nature, and technology, and questions where the physical ends and the illusory begins.

ABC Home shopping — 2021

This exhibition explores the relationship between hikikomori—a phenomenon of extreme social withdrawal particularly associated with Japan and other parts of Asia—and the art world through the format of a virtual home-shopping channel.

The exhibition presents objects that exist simultaneously as functional items and works of art. Texts printed on their surfaces are fragmented, scattered, and partially painted over, disrupting the objects’ original functions and meanings. Through this transformation, they lose their familiar identities and acquire new values within the context of art.

These objects serve as a metaphor for hikikomori: individuals who withdraw from conventional social structures and whose roles and values can become difficult to define according to society’s established expectations. By repositioning altered everyday objects as artworks, the project questions how value, function, and identity are constructed—and what happens when something or someone no longer fits within an expected system.

The virtual home-shopping channel adds another layer to this inquiry. Borrowing a format designed to promote consumption and assign value to objects, it presents the artworks from multiple perspectives while creating a tension between commercial value, artistic value, and social value. Through this staged encounter, the audience is invited to reconsider how we determine the value of both objects and individuals.

How to protest in quarantine — 2021

Art is not a democracy but it comes from democracy

This project by SangDoo Nam explores the relationship between democracy, protest, and digital technology. Responding to the Hong Kong pro-democracy demonstrations, the artist transforms everyday objects into human-like faces using digital tools. These virtual characters are then used on TikTok to repeat slogans originally voiced during the demonstrations, transferring political messages from physical protest into digital space.

Alongside these virtual interventions, Nam uses abstract painting and the physical destruction and transformation of everyday objects to express emotions and personal responses to the political situation. The contrast between physical actions and digitally constructed characters reflects different ways in which protest, emotion, and political expression can circulate between real and virtual environments.

By combining painting, objects, digital manipulation, and social media, the project examines how technology has changed the way political messages are produced, repeated, and distributed. It raises questions about the role of the individual in digital activism, the transformation of collective voices through social media, and the possibilities and limitations of art as a form of political expression.

Other — 2021

Total and complete shutdown — 2021

This project explores the gap between digital and physical information and questions how technology shapes our perception of reality. Using a cardboard box carrying a slogan associated with hate speech, painted lines, photography, and digital manipulation, the artist examines how information changes as it moves between physical and digital spaces.

In the resulting photograph, painted lines appear to meet perfectly from a specific viewpoint. In physical space, however, this alignment is unstable: it changes according to the observer’s position. The photograph therefore presents a seemingly objective and coherent image that cannot be experienced in the same way in reality. The subsequent use of Photoshop to remove the devices involved in producing the photograph further emphasizes how digital technologies construct, alter, and sometimes conceal the conditions behind what we see.

Another element of the project traces the movement of a shadow at sunrise. By translating the changing shadow into painted lines, the artist explores how information is transformed—and inevitably lost—through processes of observation, documentation, transmission, and interpretation. The line, normally associated with clarity and logical structure, becomes a means of revealing the limitations of representation and communication.

At the center of the work is the circulation of hate speech through digital media. The phrase “total and complete shutdown,” taken from a statement made by Donald Trump during his 2015 presidential campaign, becomes physical material within the work. Removed from its original media context and placed within a tangible object and environment, the phrase raises questions about how political language travels, changes meaning, and enters both public and private spaces.

Through the interaction of text, image, physical space, and digital manipulation, the project examines the relationship between perception and representation. It asks what happens to information as it passes from one person, medium, or environment to another—and how digital technologies influence what we ultimately understand as reality.

Malerei oder nicht? — 2020

We are the virus — 2020

During the quarantine, when people’s freedom and mobility were temporarily restricted, reports frequently appeared showing signs of nature recovering in the absence of human activity.

Yet the pandemic was only one of many crises we faced. Climate change, social inequality, racism, the refugee crisis, and hatred continued to shape our world. This raises an uncomfortable question: Are we, as human beings, the virus that continuously creates problems on Earth?

In this project, I use the apartment—the confined space of quarantine—as a reflection of our chaotic presence in the world. By transforming this private living space into an artistic environment, I attempt to visualize the traces, contradictions, and disorder of human existence during a moment when our relationship with nature, society, and one another was suddenly called into question.