Kim Tschang-Yeul was a Korean contemporary artist known for his paintings depicting water drops that combine modes of photo-realism and Abstract Expressionism. Born in 1929 in Maengsan in what is now North Korea, during the Japanese occupation of Korea, Kim followed his family south, where he attended the College of Fine Art at Seoul National University between 1948 and 1950. In the mid-1950s, he became associated with the Korean Art Informel movement, which was noted for its embrace of abstraction in place of representational art and rejection of the academic, government-sponsored National Art Exhibition known as gukjeon.
Read MoreAfter participating in the Paris Biennale in 1961 and São Paulo Bienal in 1965, Kim moved to New York, where he studied at the Art Students League. His early oil paintings, such as Phenomenon (1968) or Composition (1969), depict clusters of air bubble-like forms surrounded by rings of soft or opaque colours. These works signal Kim's departure from his contemporaries like Park Seo-Bo, Chung Chang-Sup, and Ha Chong-Hyun, whose experiments with abstraction tended towards an exploration of the surface and materiality of painting.
Settling in Paris in 1968, Kim began to create his iconic water drop paintings. His early oil-on-canvas work, Evénement de la nuit (1972), captures a single droplet against a black background; on the droplet shines a reflection of the moonlight on a window. Painted photo-realistically, Kim's water drop appears as though it will glide from the surface, but instead defies gravity and remains as it is. Such a state of ambiguity references the concept of balance in Buddhist and Taoist philosophies—the precarious balance that allows stationary water droplets to sustain their weight on the canvas.
Kim continued to paint water drops, tirelessly exploring different arrangements. These range from a patch of black paint portrayed on the surface of a rendered French newspaper, droplets meticulously portrayed on its surface (Waterdrops, 1986), to a group of raindrops on a wooden board in Bacchus (1998). In his 'Recurrence' series, which he began in 1989, the artist painstakingly added to his water drops backgrounds made up of Chinese characters from The Book of 1,000 Characters, an instructive text for Chinese calligraphy. Some 'Recurrence' paintings, such as Recurrence PK 99006 (1999), show the characters locked neatly into a grid, while others, such as Recurrence SH10012 (2002), depict them in repeated fragments to the point that they appear abstract and indecipherable.
Kim's work has been shown at Gallery Hyundai, Seoul (2020); Almine Rech Gallery, New York (2018); Gwangju Museum of Art (2014); National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (2012); and Busan Museum of Art (2009), among others. In Korea, he was honoured with The National Order of Cultural Merits in 2012. The Kim Tschang-Yeul Museum of Art, dedicated to his life's work, opened in Jeju Island in 2016.
Ocula | 2019
Kim, who spent much of his life in Paris, was among Korea's most celebrated artists.
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Korean artist Kim Tschang-Yeul reflects on his life and work, with Tina Kim Gallery now exhibiting a selection of paintings created in New York and Paris.
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The spectacular Park Seo-Bo exhibition at White Cube's Bermondsey space will open to the public on 13 April.
Moving far beyond the immediacy of hyperrealist trompe l'oeil effects, Tschang-Yeul's paintings reveal a powerfully meditative atmosphere.
Kim Tschang-Yeul (b. 1929), a towering figure of Korean modern art, is best known for his trompe l'oeil depictions of pristine water drops beaded on either a monochromatic surface or raw linen. As Kim Tschang-Yeul: New York to Paris, at Tina Kim, underscores, it was while living he was living in New York that his work began to change, leading...
Artist Kim Tschang Yeul has been painting water drops for more than 45 years. What began as a spark of inspiration soon became a signature motif that differentiated him from his Korean compatriots. With nearly two dozen paintings spanning half a century of work on view, the retrospective at Almine Rech Gallery New York traced the visual...
Donald Trump will make an appearance of sorts at this year’s Art Central fair in Hong Kong. Visitors will find him in a 1930s-style living room hidden among the gallery booths filled with abstract paintings and polished sculptures. When people enter the homely space, they'll be asked to sit down, make themselves comfortable and turn on the vintage...
JEJU - Water remembers everything and leads people to meditate, but at the same time it helps people wash off pain, fury and fear: this could be what the artworks now on view at a new exhibition at the Kim Tschang-yeul Museum on Jeju island tell together.
