So, I am Nayoung. I also go by Kelly, but Nayoung is good. I'm a multidisciplinary artist, art director, and designer. Professionally, I work in the advertising space as an art director, but I would love to expand more into design. But in my free time, with my personal creativity, I am an artist. I work primarily with airbrushing right now but I also work with all different forms of media, like oil paint. That one has my heart. I've also been really into image transferring lately.
HOW DID YOU GET INTO ART?
C: All right, so the classic question is, what got you into art? Like how was the story? Did you grow up as an artistic kid, or was it more on a craft you worked on throughout your adult years?
Yeah, for sure. I was artistically inclined even as a kid. Back in kindergarten, I would always draw these anime girl princesses for everybody. And I feel like that was very encouraging. From there, I developed a skill for drawing. Later on, when I was in middle school, I asked my parents for a tablet and Photoshop CS5, which is a crazy thing to get your child when they're 11.
E: Yeah, that is so crazy. Isn't that like a couple hundred bucks?
Yeah, it was at the time.
Most kids probably would have cracked it or something at the time. But they were nice enough to buy me a copy. So I became fluent in Photoshop and digital art pretty early on. I was very much in the trenches of the internet as a kid. And I think many people who resonate with my art tend to be, too. But that's how I developed my early artistic skills, drawing all this digital art, a lot of Pokemon fan art, and all the chronically-online-cringe stuff you’d see on DeviantArt.
E: What's your favorite Pokemon?
I would say Flareon.
E: Huh, really? I feel like that's the worst Eevee ever. Wait, why?
I don't know, it's just like the design of it. What's your favorite?
E: Damn, I'd say mine is either Garchomp, Jirachi, or Piplup. Okay. Yeah, one of those three.
Piplup, interesting.
Yeah, what about you?
C: Probably Infernape.
Interesting. Ooh, direct opposition there.
C: Yeah, well, I just like monkeys.
E: Yeah, oh, I thought you were gonna say Simisear.
C: I do like Simisear. Oh, they're very similar. Yeah, fire monkeys.
E: Honestly, we like this because I was talking to Amy about this, but she liked Sugar's interview because she said the beginning was super casual and easier for her to get into.
C: Mmhmm. 'Cause we can swing out the gate with funny stuff.
E: So try to be funny Nayoung.
That's a lot of pressure. (laughing)
GOING FROM DIGITAL TO TRADITIONAL
E: So you said you were mostly, I guess, trained in digital art growing up. Yeah. When did you jump into more traditional?
Back in middle school, they started offering art classes in the curriculum. I had this mean ass old lady for an art teacher. She rejected me from honors art because I showed her my digital art and it wasn’t traditional enough. Now I can see why a traditional art teacher would do that based on anime art but back then I couldn’t really.
Anyway I didn't get in and she threw my art away. It was so rude. I came home crying that day, and then my parents signed me up for actual art classes. And that was a very traditional art class in Dallas, where I'm from. There's a decent Asian community and Korean community, which I feel very blessed to have grown up in. But they had a couple of art schools for Korean kids (“hagwon” 학원) who wanted to do art. From there, I started learning realism, observational drawing, and formal painting techniques.
I started with acrylic painting there and then went into oil painting. Once I got into oil painting, I just never looked back at acrylic because oil painting is so nice to blend and malleable. When I went to college, I was an art major for a little bit, but then I got scared 'cause I was like, what am I gonna do to make money? So I switched to advertising, which is currently the industry I work in. But for a while, I felt like I had to give up my personal art in order to focus on my career and officially get my first corporate agency job. So I wasn't always, you know, involved in art or painting throughout the years. It's only very recently that I started doing airbrush and merging the two spaces of digital and traditional together.
E: So, was there ever a series or downtime during which you weren't really working on art?
Yes. I feel like there were many periods in my life where I wasn't consistently making art. Ever since I started focusing on advertising as a career, I felt like I had to give it up. I gave away all my art supplies. I wish I hadn't given it away 'cause I had to buy it all back. But during those periods, there was a big impact on my mental health, and I felt like I lost my sense of identity pretty quickly. Even as a junior art director at my first agency job, I was so busy and stressed out, I convinced myself I couldn't focus on my own creativity or the work I truly wanted to do. But I realized later on, I had to make time for it even if I do have a full-time job 'cause if you really want it, you'll make time for it. That’s what I believe and try to practice at least.
BALANCING CORPORATE ART WITH YOUR OWN
C: So you mentioned your corporate art directing job; shout out to ***********.
*****? Oh, they laid me off.
C: Or not shout out.
E: What? Wait, so where do you work now?
Y'all got me at a good time. I forgot to preface that, but I did get laid off recently.
C: You gotta update your LinkedIn, man.
It was a couple of weeks ago. It's crazy boots, how abruptly companies just lay you off. I literally had a last-minute call for 8.30 in the morning put on my calendar, and it was with the executive creative director. I get on, and they're like, sorry, this is tough news, but we're gonna have to let you go. And then within five minutes, they shut me out of everything, and I was like, welp.
E: Screw ***********.
C: Yeah, never mind, **** ***********.
Oh if I get another advertising job, we might have to redact that, but it's okay.
E: We feel neutral about ***********.
C: Undisclosed information about ***********, shit. They could be good; they could be bad. We're in a neutral stance.
E: But back to my question then.
C: How was it when you were employed as an art director? Being an art director and still being an artist, was there a lot of whiplash in your head? For example, is this corporate art blending into my normal art, or is my normal art blending into the corporate art? How was the balancing act for you?
So, when you work in a corporate setting, or for a big client in general, there are a lot of guidelines and restrictions put on you. And that in itself, I feel like, is so hard to circumvent. Ideally, as someone who's in creative advertising, you would want to make something cool and something that isn't something that people just skip over on their Instagram paid social ads. But it's so hard to get truly creative things sold. Clients have rules they wanna stick to, and they're often allergic to things that are actually cool. They want the logo in every second of a six second advertising spot. So that can be very frustrating to work in the confines of. Some people would argue that you would have to be even more creative to successfully navigate all these restrictions and still make something cool, which I agree with to an extent.
But after working in agency life for several years, especially given the current economy, it's been especially hard to make truly creative work that I often just end up having to separate my personal creativity from my professional work. Those two things always feel like they’re at odds, speaking from what I’ve seen in my career, at least.
C: Wait, what part of advertising does your agency do?
So, when it comes to art direction, copywriting, and traditional creative advertising, it's more about thinking conceptually about what goes on in an ad. So if y'all ever see subway ads or a billboard, or if you ever see an Instagram ad from a company, we think about the bigger idea behind that brand for them to meet their goals as a business, before bringing it to life. As an art director, I think up those ads from a design and visual perspective.
FULL TIME ARTIST
C: Considering that you're unemployed now and have a lot more time to focus on art, is there a plan to go all in on your art in the future?
I think that's sooo scary. And I'm sure that's true for everybody. I really respect those who do pursue art full-time. Ideally, I’d love the stability of a full time job and then somehow balance that job and my creative work together. And I ask myself this question all the time, too, especially now that I have a lot of time to do it. But I’d like to get to a good balance of where I am satisfied even in the work I’m making professionally, in addition to personally. I feel like this is a tall order. But I'm gonna try, at least.
E: Have you ever been commissioned or paid for your work in terms of your freelance art?
I don't really make that much money off anything, and I also don't sell very often. Currently, I'm working on a commission for a magazine that's smaller in scale. I applied to one of their calls for art pitches and showed them my paintings, and they wanted to commission me, but it really doesn’t pay very well.
C: For what size canvas?
Well, I chose the canvas size because I had it on hand already, but it's that big. It's still in progress.
C: This one?
Yeah. You see it? You can pick it up.
E: For our viewers. I'm playing. (laughing) It's a fruit or something.
It is a mango.
E: Airbrush!
Yes, it is airbrushed.
C: Why are you yelling?
E: (laughing) Just yelling. I know art, bro. See, look, airbrush, I can tell. And it's a mango.
But the story that I'm illustrating is about a guy's juul addiction and how he met a lady in Russia to get juul pods out of desperation when they were banned. So there's going to be juul pods and chains, which I haven't painted yet.
C: How much freedom were you given? Were they like, oh, just go crazy?
I was pretty free. Yeah, they just gave me a copy of the draft of the writer's story. And from that, I just mocked up some compositions.
E: What's the typical process for you when painting something?
It's all over the place, I feel. I have so many ideas going on in my head at once. It's just a matter of discipline and time to sit down and actually act on them. But I think I'll find something that speaks to me in my head. And maybe I'll go on the internet and scroll for references for a bit. And then usually, I'll try to mock it up in Photoshop first. This is my reference for this painting. I love GettyImages and the sincere ugliness of stock photos – I love a bad but good stock image. And then I'll paint it.
E: Dude, you're sick.
E: Oh, this is an important one. Why did you get an Android?
My dad worked at an engineering company, and they use Android exclusively. So I always had Android phones when I was growing up. I guess I could technically switch now if I wanted to. But then a year ago, I lost my phone on a Lyft, and then I went to the phone store to get a new one, and I contemplated switching to an iPhone. But then they told me the price of the iPhone and then all the features of Android. And the Android had a better camera, and I was like, why would I pay more for less??
E: Can we see the Android? I haven't seen one of these in years.
Samsung 23. What do you mean years? I'm sure there are a lot of people that still use Android. Here, use the camera.
E: This looks like something my dad would use. Is it better, though? Whoa, actually, it looks pretty good to Chris. I can't even lie. It looks like it automatically corrected the light for her.
C: We're doing a spot right now for Android.
E: Take a photo of this real quick.
E: See, but mine has a more dreamlike state to it if you will. Oh yeah, it's very hazy. See? That seems a little too overcorrected over here. They definitely saturate. They made your face red. Yeah. They saturate their photos for sure. I don't know. And there's something different about distortion. Do you like its haziness?
I do.
C: I know you do; it is crazy.
E: All right, debate settled. Never buy an Android. You know what I'm saying? How much are Androids anyway?
Cheaper than iPhones. Several hundred dollars cheaper.
E: After this interview, you should get as many iPhones as possible. It's true.
C: Not true. This bit sucks. (laughing) Sponsored by Apple. This bit is terrible.
THEMES OF YOUR ART
C: So since all of your art revolves around nostalgia, how much is it like a personal feeling? 'Cause I know a lot of painters, they all paint their current emotions. How much of that is true for you?
There are different reasons I choose the subject matter that I paint. It usually depends on what I'm gravitating toward regarding imagery at the time. And even trends inform my work. This current piece has been in my head for a year, but now felt like a good time to act on it, as it feels very true to my experience currently, getting laid off from a corporate job and then debating whether or not I should go towards the light of creative freedom.
In terms of individual subject matter, I do gravitate towards nostalgic things. I think my time on the early internet as a kid with unrestricted access has really shaped that as well. Anime is more of a nostalgic thing to me rather than something I'm actually keeping up with and consuming.
Religious themes also tend to come in, too. Probably shaped by my childhood as a Korean American Christian. That's like a whole community, crazy in its own ways. But some of its imagery I find really interesting and I’d say it even influences my taste for stock photos. They’d use a lot of bad stock imagery in worship lyrics on powerpoints or flyers.
E: What's the average turnaround time on a painting?
Oh God, it took forever to do that dog painting. Anything from a month to six months apparently.
E: I love that dog painting.
I couldn't always sit down and paint as much as I would have liked thanks to my job. I also have a tendency of wanting to redo things over and over again. And with an airbrush, it can be so finicky—like you don't have that much control over it—or at least I don't, not in the same way I have over a brush.
I can spend hours and days upon days redoing one section of a painting. Also, depending on the texture of the painting, I like to combine an actual brush with it just to get harder edges. And then I'll airbrush it some more. So it's a constant back and forth, like the practice of brush and airbrush, and sometimes just starting over completely or never finishing because I grew bored with the original subject matter. Or sometimes airbrushing as a medium doesn’t feel right for the concept and I’ll stop.
C: You said you're originally from Dallas, right?
Yeah, I've lived there basically my whole life. But I've always wanted to move to New York just 'cause there's a creative hustle about the city that you can't really get anywhere else, especially compared to the cities in Texas. I lived in Austin for a little bit, too. And that's also a nice place, for sure. It's just a different creative energy.
E: Let's talk less about the technique behind your work and get into some of its meaning. What's your favorite piece and why?
I don't have that many pieces. I guess this one might be my favorite currently. It's not even done yet, but I just really like this for its relevance to my life right now.
If we wanna talk thematically, though, I really love exploring what lies in between sincerity, irony, and absurdity across all of my art. Nostalgia has been a reliable way to capture sincerity, but I’ve also been thinking about how even a curation of sincerity results in a loss of it, becoming more ironic in doing so.
E: Are we allowed to show people this?
Sure, you can show the work in progress. I guess I keep referring to it throughout the interview.
E: Yeah, I wanna give them a visual. Do you name your pieces?
Not really. I guess whenever I post something captioned on Instagram, I'm like, "I guess that could be like a semblance of a title." This one, I don't know what I'll name it yet.
C: Corporate Man Reaching Out to Anime Girl.
That's very on the nose. That's the Getty Images title. Maybe something about rapture or salvation, which is also on the nose… but maybe in parentheses I’ll write, “damn I got laid off.”
E: But why, though?
Why, what?
E: (laughs) Explain the meaning behind it. Sorry. Explain the meaning behind the painting.
I think it alludes to disillusionment. And just like having to commodify my art or creativity and always being at a crossroads, do I sell myself out to make money, or do I do what's authentic to me and ultimately doesn't sell? Yeah. I think it is a universal sentiment across many different artists and creatives, but it feels especially relevant to me right now...
E: So, what's your end goal with your art? Are you imagining galleries one day?
That would be nice. But I think in the short-term, I’d measure my creative success by having a sense of creative community, both online and offline. I don't know if I can say right now that I do, but I would love to.
C: Yeah, I think your work is really cool. It'd be cool to find more people to share it physically. 'Cause a lot of your work is only shown digitally.
E: So you're interested in breaking into the physical realm of showing art? I've only seen your paintings on Instagram, and they're very nice there. I do really like seeing your paintings on my feed, but I think seeing them in person is a whole different thing. I understand the scale a lot better.
E: Do you have any experience ever showing your work in a physical setting?
Very loosely. I mean, there's, of course, student exhibitions back in school, but I guess the most recent one would be when I participated in an art popup. It was in Bushwick, and all different kinds of vendors came to sell printed clothing or their photography. A lot of other fashion, too.
It was kind of overwhelming, like the amount of stuff that was in there, and it’s not how you would traditionally imagine art to be consumed in a gallery space, but I thought it was fun. I'm not sure if I'd be interested in stuff like that again, but I'd love to sell prints someday.
C: But as an artist, how do you feel like people receive it? Obviously, people can leave nice comments, but in those spaces where you did show up in the physical aspect, how was the reception? Does the reception matter to you, or is it more like I will get it out regardless? I don't really care.
What do you mean by reception?
C: Reception of the art, like people leaving comments or leaving notes or people like it, or is it more of a like, I'm just showing you guys 'cause I want to show you guys, it doesn't really matter what you guys think. How's that balance for you?
That's tough, especially as I get older and create more. I feel like you can't exclusively separate what people think from your art. Maybe the best artists are the ones who are able to, though. But I would love a good maintenance of balance between the two 'cause I think other people's opinions of your art matter to an extent. I don't think it should be to your detriment to where you're constantly in flux, like just agreeing with people's opinions and adjusting your art exactly to what they think. But I also think I would be interested in taking into account the perspective of my art from those who matter, like peers who have a similar taste or someone you admire.
C: What do your parents think about your art?
I don't show them.
E: Will you ever show them?
Maybe.
C: Or do I have to hit a certain milestone before I can show my parents?
Maybe that too, yes. I'm sure their priorities for me right now are a bit different...
E: What do you think is like, is this like a, I'm gonna be like 60 on painting?
Maybe. I do like painting a lot. And I've always done it throughout most of my life. But I also wouldn't want to pigeonhole myself into one medium. Like I really love digital stuff too, and I like design from a fine arts perspective. I'm currently trying to make a font. Even though I don't know anything about it. I bought the Glyphs program, and I've just been messing around on it. But yeah, I don't know. We’ll see if painting will stick in the future.
C: How do you balance that between all the mediums? Creating a font is completely different than airbrushing. Airbrushing is completely different from oiling. How do you keep that all in your head?
That's the struggle, right? Like there's not enough time and there's such a learning curve with many of these different mediums. But I guess my resolution for this year, too, was just to try new things. I might not be good at it, but at least I would've tried it. And that's still adding to my repertoire. But it is hard to balance, especially when you need a job and money to fund such things…
E: Yeah. You gotta get on prints. They would do well. They would do numbers. I think they would do well. Did I tell you that when you came to our event and gave us the two keychains, many people asked about them?
Oh really? That's good.
E: I feel like you should make more. Even in your physical work, the digital aspect remains. I think that's probably why many people from our generation resonate with your work—it does feel very much inspired by the internet.
E: Typically, how we like to wrap these up is by asking, "Do you have any plans in general for you as an artist, you as a person?" What's next for you?
That's the question…I don't know; I ask myself this daily. To start, I would like another job. So, if anyone's hiring for a designer or art director, let me know.
E: We have a lot of hiring agents that read our website.
Oh really? What else would I wanna do? Oh, I would love to paint on clothes.
E: Honestly, I would love one of those.
C: I'll have to show you this after, but our friend does some pretty crazy airbrush stuff as well. And I feel like you could do something similar. It's not obvious in this style because you have a different style, but I feel like the streets might need that.
C: All right, let's get to the, oh, shoutouts. Do you have any shoutouts?
Shout out to my roommates. They are my biggest cheerleaders. Amy and Anna.
C: Who else, anybody else? Mom, Dad.
Of course, my parents. And my dog who’s about to die. Shout out to your dog. What's your dog's name? Beepy (bbi-bbi, “삐삐”). What's that, Beepy? It's an onomatopoeia in Korean.
E: What does Beepy mean?
It sounds like something squeaky.
E: Oh. He does squeak a lot. Beepy, Beepy. Beepy.
C: What kind of dog is that?
Terrier mix. He looks like a rat now 'cause he's so old.
C: Is he white?
Yeah.
C: Korean dog.
THANK YOU NAYOUNG FOR TALKING WITH US. HER WORK IS PHENOMENAL! MAKE SURE TO FOLLOW HER ON INSTAGRAM. PRINTS FROM HER SOON HOPEFULLY, OR MAYBE YOU'LL BE LUCKY ENOUGH TO CATCH HER AT OUR THIRD YEAR CELEBRATION PARTY!
CAN WE TALK ABOUT THE DOG ONE, THAT'S MY FAVORITE PAINTING LIKE EVER. DID YOU GUYS KNOW ITS LIKE THE HAL LABORATORIES DOG? I REMEMBER PLAYING KIRBY GROWING UP AND SEEING IT. -e
SUBJECT/BRAND : NAYOUNG KELLY @nayoungkelly
PHOTOGRAPHER : E&C* @acediastudios
MODEL : NAYOUNG KELLY @nayoungkelly
EDITOR : E&C* @acediastudios TEXT : E&C* @acediastudios
