Tina Kim Gallery presents early historical paintings by Korean Modern Master, Kim Tschang-Yeul. Our presentation provides an in-depth investigation of the development of his signature distinctive style while he was in NY and Paris from 1960-1980s.
Kim Tschang-Yeul is arguably the most internationally renowned postwar artist from Asia, known for his signature motif, the water drop. He is a painter, a poet, and a philosopher with profound knowledge of both Eastern and Western literature. As Kim is from the generation who suffered the most during the Korean War, his works are reflections of this tumultuous historical time. Our presentation provides an in-depth investigation of the development of his signature distinctive style while he was in New York and Paris from the 1960s to the 1980s.
Kim Tschang-Yeul left Korea during the Cold War, as did a number of artists from North Korea at the time. In the aftermath of the Korean War, they were marginalized and faced difficulty adjusting to the social structure of the South, which upheld its strong regional favoritism. Many of them found their careers both academically and financially stunted, as they lacked South Korean affiliation and favor. They often felt threatened to express their opinions under strict government censorship; consequently, many of these artists fled and settled abroad, including artists such as Nam-June Paik and the composer Isang Yun.
Prior to his arrival to Paris, Kim traveled across the United States and surveyed contemporary art scenes with the John D. Rockefeller 3rd Fund. Subsequently renamed as the Asian Cultural Council in 1980, this fund was founded in 1963 to support cultural exchanges with artists from Asia. When Kim arrived in New York in 1965, he suffered a great deal of frustration as he could not freely communicate and actively engage in profound discourses with his American counterparts due to the language barrier. He was overpowered by prevailing artistic movements at the time, namely Pop Art, Minimalism, and Fluxus. The artist would later describe his experience in New York as more difficult and isolating than his agony from the Korean War. Still, these sufferings came into fruition as Kim became acquainted with Nam-June Paik, who supported Kim’s participation in the Avant-Garde Festival in 1969. It was in New York that Kim started producing colorful spherical forms, which he often called “paintings of the intestines.” Such practice equipped the artist to reinforce his conceptual experimentation, and later paved the way to his mature style.
Settling in Paris in 1969, Kim reestablished his artistic career and served as an important bridge between many Korean artists who visited Paris during that time, including the Dansaekhwa masters Lee Ufan and Park Seo-Bo. The following year, the artist unveiled a painting of a magnified single drop of water in the first exhibition at Salon de Mai in Paris, France. It was Kim’s ability to navigate between diverse modes of abstraction, minimalism, and photorealism that led him to settle into this motif that he would continue to pursue to this day.
Spanning the early 1970s to present day, Kim Tschang-Yeul devoted his career to a single optical device that allowed him to confront the dichotomy between nature and contemporary culture: the drop of water. As Kim explained, “The act of painting water drops is to dissolve all things within [these], to return to a transparent state of ‘nothingness.’ By returning anger, anxiety, fear, and everything else to ‘emptiness,’ we experience peace and contentment. While some seek the enhancement of ‘ego,’ I aim toward the extinction of the ego and look for the method of expressing it.”
Kim Tschang-Yeul was born in Maengsan, Korea in 1929 and graduated from the College of Fine Art, Seoul National University in 1950. In 1996, Kim was bestowed with the French Order of Arts and Letters followed by the National Order of Cultural Merits of Korea in 2012. The artist participated major international group exhibitions such as Korean Contemporary Painting Exhibition, Paris, France (1971); Salon de Mai, Paris, France (1972-76); Korea: Facet of Contemporary Art, Tokyo Central Museum, Tokyo, Japan (1977); and Korean Drawing Now, The Brooklyn Museum, New York, USA (1981). Kim’s significant retrospectives were held at the Gwangju Museum of Art, Korea (2014); National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung, Taiwan (2012); National Museum of China, Beijing (2005); and Jeu de Paume National Gallery, Paris, France (2004). In honor of the artist, Kim Tschang-Yeul Museum was founded in 2016 in Jeju, Korea, recently showcasing Kim’s solo exhibition, Récurrence, in 2018.
His works can be found among the collections of numerous institutions including the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea; Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Korea; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art, Japan; National Museum of Modern Art, Japan; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, USA; and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, USA.
