Tschoonsu Kim
Starting with the question of “what is painting?”, Tschoonsu Kim has been delving for the fundamental problems of art through steady presentations of his works from the series in 1990’s to in 2000’s. His method to approach ‘the essence of painting’ was to use his hands, not the brushes. Shifting the perspectives from visual to tactile, and from illusion to materiality, he fills the entire canvas with the blue dots taken with his fingers in a deep “Ultra-Marine” color.
His simple and restrained blue canvases compress the time he lived, and the emotions and experiences he had while working. Over his 30-year career, he has faced the canvas with his body as a direct medium and raised the materiality of a simple paint to a conscious and practical level by endlessly repeating actions. His way of working is called “the aesthetics of the body,” and it differentiates itself conceptually from that of Western monochrome paintings, despite the similarity of the visual results between the two.
Having majored in painting at College of Art in Seoul National University, he has been teaching students in the Department of Western Painting at the same university. He won the 3rd Total Art Grand Prize and participated in the Sao Paulo Biennale in 1996 as a representative of the Korean Pavilion.
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