FRIEZE MASTERS

Using solid wood as her primary medium, she visualises the intersection between nature, time, and history, reconsidering the very essence of human existence. Her early sculptures from the 1970s are deeply rooted in traditional Korean hanok architecture, which uses a distinctive technique that joins wooden blocks without nails. Her paintings are marked by distinctive surface fragmentation; across her compositions, large sections gradually divide into smaller shapes. The resulting artworks evoke a primordial energy, at once expansive and concise, concentrated and diffused. The presentation will also include a selection of ephemera from Kim’s studio inSeoul, reconstructing her creative environment.

Selections from several series will be on view at the booth. In the artist’s acclaimed Song of My Soul paintings, Kim creates by process of addition and reduction, using a knife to apply and scrape off paint. These invented “scapes”—land, sea, sky—convey an embodiment of Kim’s emotional and spiritual connection to a place, rather than any formal geographic location, emphasised via the repeated title Song of My Soul.Similarly, Kim’s more recent sculptural series Tree Full of Songs, where she paints on cast bronze, functions as an expression of the artist’s spiritual energy. Meanwhile, sculptures fromKim’s historic and ongoing Add Two Add One Divide Two Divide One series are assemblages of terracotta-hued natural wood—algarrobo, indigenous to South America—stacked vertically and scarred with angular notches and planes. The resulting objects appear like sprouting plants or gestural figures, evoking both human and animal forms.