Daul Kim

Biography

Daul Kim opened her first solo exhibition of paintings in Seoul on 10 August 2007, when she was eighteen. By then she had been on international runways for half a year.

She was born in Seoul on 31 May 1989. At four she was taken abroad: she spent part of her childhood in Malaysia and was educated in Singapore. At thirteen she was spotted by the Singaporean modeling agency Avenue, and at fifteen she left school and returned to Korea to pursue modeling. She later called herself an “outsider” because of her nomadic childhood; at home she initially had few Korean friends. Besides Korean, she spoke English, Chinese and French.

In Korea she began working professionally in 2006: editorials for Vogue Korea and music videos for Park Hye-kyung’s “Yesterday” and Nell’s “Healing”. In March 2007 she made her runway debut at Paris Fashion Week, where she walked for Chanel, Dries Van Noten and Maison Margiela. In the spring came her first editorial for i-D, and in July she walked in Chanel’s haute couture show in Paris; in August she appeared on the cover of Vogue Korea. That autumn she became one of the faces of Moschino in a campaign photographed by Peter Lindbergh, modeled for the Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom catalogs, and at the September shows in Milan and Paris worked for Salvatore Ferragamo, Alexander McQueen and Chanel. At about the same time she appeared in the third season of the Mnet reality series I AM A MODEL.

Alongside this she painted, drew, and worked in photography and video. In 2007 she made and edited a short film, 4, in which she played an airplane passenger. She said she wanted to become a film director.

In 2008 she walked for Dolce & Gabbana, Louis Vuitton and Duro Olowu, then for Anna Sui, Rodarte, Christopher Kane and again Alexander McQueen. She appeared in i-D, Another Magazine, V and Dazed & Confused, and was photographed for H&M and Tank; in May and July she was on the covers of Vogue Korea and Harper’s Bazaar Korea. For New York magazine she documented her week at New York Fashion Week. In the summer her book Seoul’s Treasure House came out, written with the fashion editor Jeon Hyo-jin: 208 pages on the city’s shops, restaurants and cultural spaces. Kim wrote sections of interviews and reports, as well as an account of life in New York, London, Paris and Seoul. The launch took place in Seoul on 2 August 2008. Separately, she kept a personal blog, I Like to Fork Myself, under the name Daul Monster, with her drawings, observations, and poetic and personal entries. I would read it as part of her work rather than an appendix to it.

In 2009 she opened the Karen Walker show in New York, walked for Vivienne Westwood, Bottega Veneta, Roberto Cavalli and others, left Elite Models and signed with Next Model Management, moving to Paris. She received the Fashion Model Award at the Asia Model Festival Awards. In June she appeared nude in an i-D editorial, and some Korean commentators criticized her. On her blog she replied, defending nudity in fashion and arguing that Korean women were held to different standards. In August she appeared in British Vogue, and in October on the cover of the Australian magazine Russh and in a Topshop commercial.

Daul Kim died on 19 November 2009 in Paris, in her apartment in the 10th arrondissement. She was twenty. The French authorities ruled it a suicide. Her funeral took place on 2 December 2009, and her remains were placed in a columbarium in Yangpyeong.