How Na Kim sees

Dear friends,

A lot of book covers have come to look pretty much the same. Through some combination of market forces related to thumbnail display on Amazon’s app and signaling to BookTok’s massive purchasing power, there’s been a march toward homogeneity that can feel dispiriting.

Na Kim’s book covers are different.

They are striking; they take risks. They are good.

I became interested in understanding how Na does this — how she takes in a novel and translates it into an image. Then I learned she was doing a version of this at The Paris Review: finding or commissioning art to go in its pages, and to serve as a cover.

When I saw recently that Na would be exhibiting her own paintings, it felt like the right moment to bring the story to The New York Times. Na, who is a deeply private person, was gracious enough to open her Clinton Hill studio — and contacts — to me.

Dana Scruggs for NYT

We spoke a lot about what it means to do the thing she does so well: alchemize words into images. And I spoke to writers like Sheila Heti, Raven Leilani, and Jeffrey Eugenides about what it was like to go back and forth with Na as she worked this magic on their books.

“I didn’t even know that it was possible to feel that way about a cover,” Sheila told me.

So much of Na’s work is about diminishing herself to make room for this work of translation. But now that she is painting — her work is on view until February 22 at Nicola Vassell Gallery in Chelsea — I wanted to capture what I could of Na’s private self.

I learned that Na is a tinkerer and a maker with an appetite for the whimsical and absurd: she and a friend fashioned miniature shoes out of bread for a now-defunct project they called Panolo Blahnik.

She has a bumper sticker on a utility cart in her studio that says, for some reason, “I’ll die for your fat ass.” She gives the best gifts, her friends told me, both IRL and in Animal Crossing. She takes her dog, Moon, everywhere. She listens to Bad Bunny, Willie Nelson, and the Grateful Dead. She’s obsessed with the artist Ann Craven, who specializes in painting the moon.

And every day, she makes time to complete a painting, returning again and again to the same portrait of an imagined subject. (Don’t even think about suggesting it might be a self-portrait.)

via Na Kim and Nicola Vassell Gallery; Photo by Lance Brewer

To me, these canvases feel like Na’s own covers — translations into imagery not of a book — but instead, of something of herself.

xo,

Lindsay