In the pantheon of influences on contemporary sculptors, Kazemir Malevich is a conspicuous outlier. Although best known for his non-objective paintings that subvert the correlation between form and meaning, he also created a handful of abstract sculptures that manifest the primacy of pure feeling to which he believed all art should aspire. The industrial aesthetic of these angular structures, called “Arkhitektons,” evince a brutalist presence that proclaims the dominance of the human intellect and the built environment over the natural landscape. 

South Korean artist Hyun Nahm expresses a profound admiration for Malevich’s oft-overlooked sculptural oeuvre, but instead of interpreting these works as modernist symbols of “a bright utopian dream,” he thought of them as “something quite scary with dystopian nuance.” A quick overview of his own works corroborates this sentiment—exaggerated architectural forms that appear alternately stretched and squished, riddled with holes and sharp edges, and covered in a thin layer of pink residue reminiscent of a toxic fungus. Hyun’s catastrophic ruins convey contradictory associations of creation and decay, substance and void, monumental and miniature, exposing the frail substructures beneath the slick veneer of technofuturist desire.