Hyun Nahm's Dystopian Sculptures Reinterpret Malevich's Architectural Forms

South Korean artist Hyun Nahm draws inspiration from Kazimir Malevich's abstract sculptures known as "Arkhitektons," which the Russian avant-garde painter created to express pure feeling through industrial, angular forms. While Malevich viewed these works as embodying utopian ideals, Nahm interprets them with dystopian undertones, seeing something frightening in their modernist symbolism. Nahm's own sculptural practice features exaggerated architectural forms that appear stretched, squished, and perforated with holes and sharp edges. These structures are covered in a thin pink residue resembling toxic fungus, creating contradictory associations between creation and decay. The works expose fragile substructures beneath the slick surfaces of technofuturist aspirations, presenting what the artist describes as catastrophic ruins. Malevich, primarily recognized for his non-objective paintings that challenge form-meaning relationships, produced a limited number of sculptures that demonstrate a brutalist presence asserting human intellect over nature. Nahm's admiration for this overlooked aspect of Malevich's oeuvre informs his exploration of monumental and miniature scales, substance and void, in works that question contemporary architectural desires.