Na Kim’s work was highlighted in the It’s Nice That article, “Five designers and studios creating beautiful book covers.” Her work regularly appears in annual “best-of” roundups chosen by The New York Times, LitHub, and The Washington Post.
In December of 2023, she exhibited “a group of ten recent paintings from her ongoing series of imagined portraits” at White Columns Gallery in NYC. This was her first solo show. In a conversation with White Columns’ director Matthew Higgs, the artist elaborated on the origin of this collection:
“In the beginning, there was one subject—one imagined face. The series is my attempt to render that face over and over again. Which is to say that there was this platonic ideal that I was working towards, almost obsessively. Over time, I found that every new portrait I created looked the same but different, sometimes so different it could be understood as the face of someone else entirely. And yet the resemblance remained. The portraits are derivative, as opposed to carbon copies, as if each painting gives birth to the next – so there is a sort of genealogy to them.”
Shortly thereafter, The Metropolitan Opera of New York City selected one of her paintings from this series to anchor their marketing campaign for the musical “Carmen.”
Na Kim’s series design for Tove Ditlevsen’s Copenhagen Trilogy was cataloged in this detailed article by PRINT Mag (Zachary Petit, 2021). She delves into her process of designing Roberto Bolaño’s The Spirit of Science Fiction with AIGA’s Eye on Design. In 2017, she wrote a story for LitHub, called ‘When Your Favorite Writer Does Not Like Your Initial Cover Designs,’ detailing her process of designing the cover for Jeffrey Eugenides’s Fresh Complaint.
In a conversation with The Creative Independent, she defined a “successful book cover” as such:
“Success is when everyone’s happy: the editor, the publisher, the author. We’re designing books a year ahead of when they’re released, so if I can still be really happy with the book when it comes out? Then I’ve done a good job.”
Be sure to check out @Panolo Blahnik, a project she shares with fellow FSG designer, June Park.
