Synecdoche — by Byron Kim

It's a recent acquisition by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

The 48-year-old Korean American artist's piece recently went on display on the lower lever of the East Building.

Blake Gopnik, in a rave review in the November 29, 2009 Washington Post Arts & Style section, wrote, "Like a lot of the best fine art, the premise behind the piece could hardly be simpler: It consists of a grid of 429 panels, each one 8 by 10 inches. Kim has painted each panel a single shade of pink or brown or tan that is meant to reproduce the skin tone of a different person who sat for him. A grid of names on a nearby wall lets us match sitters to their color patches. Lorna Simpson, the well-known African American artist, turns out to be dark-chocolate brown. The late Marcia Tucker, founder of the New Museum in New York, is a pale beige. Kim's unfamous relations tend toward pale olives and dark buffs."

"Kim allows his piece to be installed in a grid of any size; its panels are to be arranged alphabetically by the first names of the sitters. Begun in 1991, the open-ended work will continue to have 'portraits' added to it."

"Harry Cooper, the National Gallery's head of modern and contemporary art, suggested to me that the piece immediately gets viewers thinking about where their own skin might sit in Kim's grid. Then he rolled up his sleeve to check his own place in it, and made me realize how many different 'skin tones' even one person is made of: The black-haired back of Cooper's hand is something very different from the hairless skin behind his ear, not to mention his lips or elbows. Our standard ideas about fixed and separate races are as artificial as the clean boundaries between one Kim panel and the next. Kim's grid is closer to the colors in a theatrical makeup box than to anything that we can truly find out on the street. Or, in our new digital age, we might prefer to read it as a vastly pixelated close-up on a single face than as a compendium of many different identities."

"The literary term 'synecdoche' refers to a figure of speech that takes a part of something for the whole — saying 'all hands on deck' when you hope for more than hands to show up. Kim's 'Synecdoche' raises questions about how any picture could ever act as shorthand for the world's impossible complexity."

"Molly Donovan, the National Gallery curator responsible for the Kim acquisition, saw the piece when it first went on view at the Whitney, and remembers how 'radical' it seemed back then. Now, however, she can only see it as 'prescient' of everything that's happened in art since: It seems, she says, 'so absorbed into the discourse.' Which means it's time it entered her gallery's collection."

The artist speaks about the piece here.