Individual Story I

Individual Story I opens a series in which Nam uses stone lithography as a vehicle for personal narrative, the Roman numeral signaling an ongoing rather than singular investigation. The eight-run, ten-color build — eight separate passes through the press, with several runs carrying split-fountain blends to yield the additional hues — points to a layered, methodical compositional approach typical of Tamarind-trained lithographers. Drawn matrices of this kind are constructed iteratively: each stone carries one element of the image, worked in tusche or lithographic crayon, and transparent overprints allow forms to layer without becoming opaque. Registration across eight runs demands careful proofing between pulls, and the colour count signals attention to chromatic depth rather than flat poster-like fields. Nam's training at the Tamarind Institute in Albuquerque and his M.F.A. at SUNY Buffalo placed him within the North American workshop tradition that values this kind of multi-stone construction, and the Individual Story works sit alongside his broader practice of using lithography to negotiate between Korean printmaking heritage and the pedagogies of U.S. print centres in which his graduate training was rooted.