KIM YUN SHIN
b. 1935, North KoreaBest known for her expressive wooden sculptures and paintings that reflect both Korean heritage and Latin American influences, artist Kim Yun Shin blends contemporary art with a meditative engagement with nature, language, and cultural duality.
Early Years
Born in 1935 in Gaesong, a city in present-day North Korea, Kim Yun Shin grew up during a time of profound national upheaval. After graduating from the Department of Painting at Hongik University in Seoul, she became a formative presence in Korea’s postwar art scene. In the late 1980s, Kim relocated to Buenos Aires, Argentina—a move that radically expanded her aesthetic vocabulary.
Living between Seoul and Buenos Aires, Kim absorbed the spiritual traditions, natural materials, and artistic techniques of both cultures. Her sculptures often reflect Indigenous Argentine motifs while maintaining philosophical ties to Korean Buddhist thought and the formal discipline of calligraphy. Her hybrid identity, forged across continents, remains central to her work.
Artworks
Kim Yun Shin’s contemporary art practice spans sculpture, painting, and printmaking, unified by a meditative sensibility and a rhythmic, additive approach to form. Her works explore absence and presence, rootedness and movement, language and silence.
Wood, Memory & the Void
Since the 1990s, Kim Yun Shin has worked predominantly with local hardwoods—algarrobo, lapacho, quebracho—carving them with a chainsaw into towering, undulating forms. Her series Add Two Add One, Divide Two Divide One (1995–ongoing) is sculpted through acts of cutting, adding, subtracting, and hollowing. The voids are intentional and philosophical, invoking East Asian principles of emptiness and balance. She once said, “When the saw and I become one, everything is free”—a statement that encapsulates the intuitive and physical nature of her process. These sculptures are not monuments but meditations: their grooves, openings, and polished skins are records of breath, labour, and lived time.
Painting as Sculpture, Sculpture as Painting
Though Kim trained as a painter, her recent work blurs the boundary between sculpture and painting. In several recent series, she applies vivid pigments—often in Korean obangsaek colour schemes—directly onto carved wooden surfaces. Rather than decorating her sculptures, these painted forms emphasise their corporeal presence. Stripes, glyphs, and abstracted vines wrap around the wood, suggesting notations or visual poems. Kim refers to this as “the legacy of painting entering the body of the tree.” These works are multisensory objects, both tactile and visual, bridging traditions of Eastern ink painting and Western abstraction through a deeply personal, bodily lens.
Song of My Soul
In parallel with her sculptural practice, Kim Yun Shin continues to make acrylic paintings on canvas. Her Song of My Soul series features knife-applied layers of paint—scraped, incised, and rebuilt in textured fields of earthy reds, deep blues, and flashes of ochre. Though abstract, they evoke landscapes, tree trunks, and celestial rhythms. These paintings are not studies or secondary works; they offer an equally vital expression of Kim’s inner world. Like her sculptures, they emerge through repetition, meditation, and process, echoing her lifelong exploration of form as a vehicle for memory, emotion, and rootedness across time and geography.
Exhibitions
Kim Yun Shin has been the subject of both solo and group exhibitions at important institutions. A selection of important exhibitions are provided below.
Solo Exhibitions
- Let art be our life, Park Soo Keun Museum in Yanggu County, Yanggu (2024)
- Kim Yunshin: Towards Oneness, Nam-Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul (2023)
- 10 Años de Fusión y Expansión, Museo Kim Yun Shin, Buenos Aires (2018)
- Museo Municipal de Arte Moderno Mendoza, Mendoza (2015)
- A Song of Soul, Hanwon Museum of Art, Seoul (2015)
Group Exhibitions
- Glittering Water: Korean Modern and Contemporary Female Artists, Lee Ungno Museum, Daejeon (2025)
- Foreigners Everywhere, the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, Venice (2024)
- 15 Korean Abstract Painters: Yesterday and Today, Ahn Sang Chul Museum, Yangju (2015)
- ‘95 Korean Women Artist Festival, Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul (1995)
Critical Reception
Kim Yun Shin’s work has been widely reviewed in publications including Artnet News, ARTnews, and Whitewall. Speaking to Ocula Magazinein 2024, Kim Yun Shin noted: ‘What I’m really trying to do here is make the work more permanent. I’m going to leave “painted sculpture” in this world. I believe I should leave behind a legacy that reflects how deeply I’ve explored my artistic pursuits. That is my assignment.’
Kim Yun Shin FAQs
What kind of art does Kim Yun Shin make?
Kim Yun Shin creates contemporary art that spans sculpture, painting, and printmaking. Best known for her abstract wooden sculptures, she uses natural materials and intuitive carving techniques to explore themes of balance, memory, and cultural identity. Her works often merge Korean philosophies such as the concept of yin and yang with Indigenous Argentine symbolism, forming a unique cross-cultural aesthetic. In recent years, she has expanded her visual language by painting directly onto carved wood surfaces and developing richly textured acrylic paintings. Her art is both meditative and physical, rooted in ritualised process and an enduring dialogue with nature.
What is Kim Yun Shin’s sculptural process?
Kim Yun Shin’s sculptural process is intuitive, physical, and deeply spiritual. She begins by selecting hardwoods—often native Argentine species such as algarrobo or lapacho—and approaches each trunk not as raw material but as a collaborator. Using a chainsaw, she carves into the wood with a rhythmic movement she likens to breathing or prayer. “When the saw and I become one, everything is free,” she told Ocula. The resulting forms are hollowed, faceted, and polished, revealing the wood’s grain and inner voids. This subtractive method, guided by feeling rather than pre-determined design, produces artworks that hold space, silence, and spirit.
How has Kim Yun Shin’s practice recently been recognised?
Kim Yun Shin has received growing international recognition for her contributions to contemporary sculpture and painting. In 2022, she was included in the Milk of Dreams exhibition at the 59th Venice Biennale, a landmark moment that brought her decades-long, transnational practice to a global stage. That same year, she began exhibiting with Lehmann Maupin, one of the world’s leading contemporary art galleries, who now represent her globally alongside other blue-chip galleries in Seoul and Buenos Aires. Her major retrospective at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA) in 2023 further cemented her status as a vital voice in modern art history, tracing her influence across continents.
Ocula | 2025
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