KIM TSCHANG-YEUL

Kim Tschang-Yeul has a history rife with struggle and exile. When he was only 15, he escaped his village in North Korea by night. He never saw his family again, including his beloved grandfather, who founded the village school and inspired him to be an artist and whose fate he never learned. Forced to serve in the army against the communists, the artist saw his friends perish and almost died at the front himself. Civil war and exile left deep wounds.

Influenced by postwar Korean art movements, for fifty years Kim Tschang-Yeul developed a remarkable oeuvre that is absolutely unique and focused on a single theme: water droplets. These droplets are not just the expression of an Asian sensibility connected to nature and the spirituality of Zen or Taoism. They also represent a process of purification, an effort to transform the trauma of war. The water droplet is not simply a void, but a still visible form of this original void, which will end up disappearing into the canvas, leaving behind a space of silence and light.

While Kim Tschang-Yeul’s work evokes tranquility, its apparent serenity is the result of a long process of transmutation. At the very beginning of his career, the artist’s Informal paintings expressed his obsession with bodily matter and fluids, themes that crystallized horror, violence, and war. Gradually, as seen in his sketchbooks as well as his most accomplished paintings, this visceral matter was transformed into a water droplet. Kim’s admiration for Francis Bacon, a virtuoso of representing flesh and wounds, emphasizes this duality: while Bacon exposed the violence of the world head-on, Kim Tschang-Yeul absorbed it and dissolved it in the theme of the water droplet. This contrast reveals all the ambiguity of his work.

— Louma Salamé, Director of the Boghossian Foundation