Synecdoche

© Courtesy the Artist and James Cohan, New York

Synecdoche

On view

North-South Artwalk
Loevner Artwalk

Synecdoche,

1991–present

Byron Kim, born 1961, La Jolla, CA; active New York, NY, and Princeton, NJ
2019-206.1-.25

Synecdoche is an ongoing archive of portraits. For this commission, twenty-five representatives of Princeton University were selected by the 2018–19 student government. Kim carefully mixed pigments to achieve an exact match of the skin tone of each sitter’s arm and then applied the paint to a pair of identical panels. A synecdoche is a figure of speech in which a part stands for the whole; in this work, Kim, a Korean American artist, explores the impossibility of a single portrait or sample of skin color capturing an individual’s complexity. Kim does not consider the piece to directly address issues of race, but he welcomes visitors to draw their own connections. Kim explains, “People always talk about race, and that’s such a constructed terminology. Skin color doesn’t map onto race very well.” One set of panels remains here; the second set joined nearly four hundred similar portraits at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

James Christen Steward, Nancy A. Nasher–David J. Haemisegger, Class of 1976, Director, Princeton University Art Museum

View full record

More About This Object

Byron Kim paints small ‘portraits’ of Princeton students: Synecdoche, 1991-present

Information

Title
Synecdoche
Dates

1991–present

Maker
Byron Kim
Medium
Oil and wax on lauan plywood, birch plywood, and plywood
Dimensions
each panel: 20.3 × 25.4 cm (8 × 10 in.) overall: 137.2 × 111.8 cm (54 × 44 in.)
Credit Line
Museum commission made possible by the Mary Trumbull Adams Art Fund
Object Number
2019-206.1-.25
Place Made

North America, United States, New Jersey, Princeton

Culture
American
Type
oil paintings, paintings
Materials
wax, oil paint, plywood
Subject
abstraction, portraits, groups of people

Commissioned by the Princeton University Art Museum, 2019.

IIIF manifest

The International Image Interoperability Framework, or IIIF, is an open standard for delivering high-quality, attributed digital objects online at scale. Visit iiif.io to learn more.

Open API URL

Our API is generally designed to provide programmatic access to the Museum's collections data for applications that require regular updates and/or the ability to dynamically query and filter the data via the endpoints provided.

Share your feedback with us

The Museum regularly researches its objects and their collecting histories, updating its records to reflect new information. We also strive to catalogue works of art using language that is consistent with how people, subjects, artists, and cultures describe themselves. As this effort is ongoing, the Museum’s records may be incomplete or contain terms that are no longer acceptable. We welcome your feedback, questions, and additional information that you feel may be useful to us. Email us at collectionsinfo@princeton.edu.

Explore More

Holidays at the Museum

Princeton Collects

Mosaic Restaurant