Exhibition Information

			| Preface | New Tools That Are Desperately Needed by Someone
   Living 2020, NAM So-yeon is crafting “the new tools that are desperately needed by someone”.  In <NSY Laboratory>, which NAM established with keen interests in survival, tool, and human relationship, she studies and devises survival tools.  The relationship between human and tool has been widely discussed under anthropological, social scopes, but borrowing the conventional concept of ‘tools’ does not seem vital for this particular exhibition.  This is because the instruments here exist for ‘someone out there’ and therefore carry a little more warmth than academic explanations by their nature.  As NAM So-yeon puts it, “‘tools’ are capable of ‘providing ease’ and ‘making difference’; this is why they are capable of offering the most variables in survival, and moreover, being the means that add colours to human lives.”

   The ‘tools of emotional function’, are the product of NAM’s research on “psychological crisis” she felt from experiences of her and peers, as well as the current society.  NAM suggests that ‘the relationships’ in reality keep on changing with different senses, and turning ‘apathetic’ in some ways: she also suspects that this transition is more than a mere individual's sense of alert but rather closely tied with the matter of survival.  Because the matter of survival does not just concern one person but people as a group instead, this very problem cannot be addressed without the subject of relationship between them.  On that regard,’the tools of emotional function’ may seem as the devices for one's psychological needs at first glance, but in actuality, the premise of ’someone to be with’ - the concept of ‘co-existence’ - is prerequisite for one to properly comprehend these instruments.

   Moreover, NAM pays close attention to the influences that the advent of unprecedented tools bring upon human thoughts and behaviors.  The ‘tools of emotional function’ too, provide more than just an account of phenomena - they aid one to imagine, experience, and use through action.  If one found <NSY Laboratory> in this exhibition and had a “giggle”, as the artist put it, then it could be the beginning of the small “variable”.