Synecdoche is an ongoing archive of portraits. For this commission, twenty-five representatives of Princeton University were selected by the 2018–19 student government. Kim carefully mixed pigments to achieve an exact match of the skin tone of each sitter’s arm and then applied the paint to a pair of identical panels. A synecdoche is a figure of speech in which a part stands for the whole; in this work, Kim, a Korean American artist, explores the impossibility of a single portrait or sample of skin color capturing an individual’s complexity. Kim does not consider the piece to directly address issues of race, but he welcomes visitors to draw their own connections. Kim explains, “People always talk about race, and that’s such a constructed terminology. Skin color doesn’t map onto race very well.” One set of panels remains here; the second set joined nearly four hundred similar portraits at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.
James Christen Steward, Nancy A. Nasher–David J. Haemisegger, Class of 1976, Director, Princeton University Art Museum
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