KIM TSCHANG-YEUL

The waterdrop motif emerged from a chance encounter with the material itself. While working in a makeshift studio outside Paris, Kim splashed water onto the back of his canvases. When the droplets caught the light, he was struck by their extraordinary appearance and began searching for a way to capture their fleeting presence through painting. Yet the waterdrop was never simply an exercise in illusionism—for Kim, its repeated depiction became a means of working through the memories of violence and loss he carried from the Korean War. As he wrote in a letter to the critic Lee Yil, “The act of painting waterdrops is to dissolve everything into an act of transparency, returning to nothingness... One seeks the expressive method, while aiming for the extinction of ego.” This conception of painting as repetition, purification, and ego-erasure was also informed by Kim’s engagement with Taoist and Zen Buddhist thought. The waterdrop thus became both subject and method: a transparent, ephemeral form through which Kim could contemplate impermanence in the repeated act of painting.

Kim Tschang-Yeul’s singular contribution to postwar painting was recently celebrated in a major retrospective at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA), in Seoul in 2025. His work is held in major international collections, including the M+, Hong Kong; Centre Pompidou, Paris; MMCA; Leeum Museum of Art, Korea; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art; and National Museum of Modern Art, Japan. The Kim Tschang-Yeul Museum, dedicated to collecting, researching, and exhibiting the artist’s works, was founded in 2016 in Jeju, Korea. In May 2026, his former home and studio in Seoul’s Pyeongchang-dong neighborhood reopened to the public as the Kim Tschang-Yeul Atelier.