Artist, Byron Kim: My name is Byron Kim. Synecdoche is a multi-panel painting. I made the individual panels by going out of my studio, and finding people, and just asking them if I could copy their skin color. And almost always they said yes. There were a variety of people, from picnickers in the park to college students to famous artists. So I'd sit down with the person, and I would mostly look at their arm. I would generally avoid using the face, because a person's face skin color tends to change really drastically as they're talking. It’s a really difficult color-mixing problem. Because the colors are really unnameable colors. And so you really have to get in there and find the color.
Synecdoche means a part standing for the whole. It's a term of grammar, really. In the Navy when they say, "All hands on deck," they don't literally mean just the hands. They mean all the sailors' bodies. So this artwork is meant to represent something. And to me, every part of it represents the whole. In other words any nine or 25 panels represents the whole piece; and the whole piece represents all of us in a way.
When I am making a painting of someone's skin color, and somehow it evokes a memory in me, then that can be a feeling that's very full. I remember making a painting of my mother's skin color. Since it was my mother's skin color, or even a mother's skin color, it represents so much because I think for the infant child, the mother's skin is sort of like a universe. And that's exactly what my work came to be eventually. Work that was concentrating on something very small to evoke something very large.