For 2023’s ADAA The Art Show, Tina Kim Gallery is pleased to present a historical presentation highlighting two seminal Asian and Asian-American artists: sculptor Minoru Niizuma (b. 1930, Tokyo; d. 1998, New York) and painter Kim Tschang-Yeul (b. 1929, Pyongannamdo; d. 2021, Paris). 

Belonging to a generation that experienced significant political turmoil, Niizuma and Kim migrated to New York in the 1960s from their respective homelands of Japan and Korea. Both artists were deeply engaged with the social and artistic milieu of the city: Niizuma taught at the Brooklyn Academy of Art, while Kim had received a Rockefeller scholarship to study at the Art Students League of New York. Although the duration that both artists spent in the city differed greatly—Niizuma would remain in New York for the rest of his life and Kim would depart for Paris after three years—both artists produced significant bodies of work, exhibited actively, and served as important cultural connectors between Asia and New York.

Bringing together sculptures of Niizuma and paintings by Kim, the presentation will include works that both artists created during their time in New York, revealing how it led to the development of the artists’ signature styles in their chosen mediums. Their approach to painting and sculpture respectively broaden definitions of “Western” art movements. Although affiliated with the emerging artistic cluster that became known as “Minimalism,” for example, Niizuma’s works differed from the systematic, pre-fabricated approach of the minimalists. Niizuma consistently emphasized the intrinsic properties of his oft-chosen mediums: marble and granite.

Similarly, when Kim Tschang-Yeul moved to New York in 1965, Pop Art prevailed as the artistic lifeblood of the city. It was in New York that Kim began his earliest experiments into painting the bulbous abstract forms that would later lead to his signature style—the waterdrop. It was during this time that the artist began experimenting with visceral abstraction, depicting colorful spherical forms which the artist aptly called “paintings of the intestines.”