Chunwoo Nam

Chunwoo Nam (b. 1965, Seoul, South Korea) is a Korean-born printmaker whose practice has centered on stone lithography, with a parallel commitment to international print education and exchange. He completed his B.F.A. at Hong-Ik University, Seoul, before moving to the United States for graduate training. He undertook lithography studies at the Tamarind Institute in Albuquerque, New Mexico — the U.S. centre for fine-art lithography — and earned an M.F.A. at the State University of New York at Buffalo. His route through Hong-Ik, Tamarind, and SUNY Buffalo aligns him with the cohort of Korean printmakers who emerged in the United States in the 1990s and early 2000s, building practices that move between Korean printmaking traditions and the workshop pedagogies of North American print centres.

Nam's work has circulated through international print exhibitions and triennials in Japan, Estonia, Russia, Taiwan, New Zealand, and across the United States. Among the major venues that have shown or collected his prints are the International Print Exhibition in Tokyo and the 14th Tallinn Print Triennial (2007). His prints are held in the permanent collections of the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum (Ueno), the Museum of Tama Art University in Tokyo, the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, the Novosibirsk State Art Museum in Russia, the Kennedy Museum of Art at Ohio University, the UB Anderson Gallery in Buffalo, the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop in New York, the Guanlan Print Studio in Shenzhen, China, and several Korean institutions including The Space in Seoul.

In 2005 Nam received an Artist's Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and additional awards followed across multiple international biennials and triennials. In 2006-07 he was selected as Artist in Residence at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, the historic New York lithography studio operated by the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts. The Blackburn residency placed Nam within a workshop lineage that traces back to the African-American master printer Robert Blackburn and emphasizes both technical excellence in lithography and cross-cultural community.

Nam has worked as a master printer in collaborative projects, including Harvey Breverman's lithograph portfolio 'Drawn from Life' (2005), printed at the University at Buffalo's Experimental Print Imaging Center. His own prints — including the 'Individual Story' series of multi-run, multi-colour stone lithographs — engage the layered translucent qualities of stone lithography as a vehicle for autobiographical and cross-cultural narrative. The series alludes to the experience of moving between Korea, Japan, China, Russia, and the United States, with the stacked colour runs serving as a visual metaphor for layered identity formed under conditions of geographic and cultural displacement.

In parallel with his studio practice, Nam has been an active educator and advocate for international printmaking exchange. He has taught at the Herron School of Art and Design in Indianapolis and runs a Print Research Center oriented toward cross-border collaboration among working printmakers. He has spoken publicly about the difficulty of preserving printmaking as a living tradition under globalization, arguing that international conferences and free exchange of ideas are what make printmakers distinctive as a community of practice. The Robert Blackburn residency, the Tamarind training, and the Korean and Japanese museum collections together place him at the centre of a 21st-century network of working lithographers whose practice spans both Asian and North American print communities.