Kim Tschang-yeul

Biography

In 1946 a sixteen-year-old schoolboy from Maengsan County wrote the word “proclamation” on a page of his exercise book, simply practising his handwriting. Both the word itself and the leaflets then posted around the town aroused suspicion. He was detained, then left school and fled south to Seoul. The details of this story are known from the artist's own accounts and are hard to verify.

Kim was born on 24 December 1929 in Maengsan County, in South Pyongan Province, then Korea under Japanese imperial rule. From the age of five his grandfather taught him calligraphy, and his maternal uncle showed him how to draw. In Seoul he studied in private studios: first with the sculptor Lee Guk-jeon, and when that studio closed, with Lee Quede at the Seongbuk Painting Studio. In 1948 he entered the College of Fine Arts at Seoul National University. Two years later the Korean War began, and his studies ended in his second year. The war took his sister and more than half of his classmates, and hardship stayed with him for more than ten years. In 1951 Kim joined the police, where relatives of his served, and remained there until 1961. In 1952–53 he served on Jeju Island, then in Seoul, at the Police Academy, where he ran the library. Through Japanese albums and magazines he learned about European art, including Art Informel, and he also contributed poems, paintings and illustrations to the academy's magazine.

In 1957 Kim and his fellow artists founded the Modern Artists' Association. They demanded change in a conservative art world and opposed the state-run National Art Exhibition of Korea (known as Gukjeon), calling their shows “anti-Gukjeon”. Their models were European Art Informel and American Abstract Expressionism. The group's fourth exhibition, Hyeondaejeon in 1958, in which Park Seo-bo and others took part, drew a great deal of attention; the critic Bang Geun-taek saw in it the collective emergence of Korean Art Informel.

Later he left the police, taught at the Seongru Art School and began looking for a way forward abroad. His works were shown at the second and third Paris Biennales (1961 and 1963) and in 1965 at the São Paulo Biennial. A grant from the Rockefeller Foundation allowed him to study in New York, at the Art Students League, from 1966 to 1968. There he was influenced by Pop Art and Minimalism, and he abandoned his customary Informel.

In 1969, with the help of Nam June Paik, Kim took part in the Paris Avant Garde Festival and stayed in France. He worked in a studio outside Paris. By his own account, one morning he saw drops of water on the back of a canvas, with the morning light playing in them.

In 1972, at the Salon de Mai in Paris, he showed “Event of Night” (Événement de la nuit): a single drop against a dark background. The painting was noticed, and after ten years of near obscurity exhibitions followed in quick succession. In 1974 he wrote to Park Seo-bo: “I have not had a single show for the last 10 years, but now all of a sudden so many shows are scheduled.” In the 1970s he was shown in Europe, America, Canada and Japan, and his works went to the fairs in Cologne and Basel. He painted the drops hyperrealistically, with exact light, shadow and an illusion of transparency, at first on coarse sackcloth-like canvas against a neutral ground, later on wood, hanji paper and newspaper. In the 1980s characters from the “Thousand Character Classic”, which his grandfather had taught him in childhood, entered the background; the series was called “Recurrence”. He himself said that painting clear drops helped him cope with his memories of war and with anxiety. Critics saw in them cleansing and the transience of individual life, while Kim, in conversation, often linked them to the Buddhist notion of emptiness.

In 1996 France made him a chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and in 2013 the South Korean government awarded him a silver crown of the Order of Cultural Merit. In September 2016 the Kim Tschang-yeul Museum opened on Jeju Island, where he had once served; he donated 220 works to it.

He died in Seoul on 5 January 2021, aged 91. His ashes are buried on the museum grounds on Jeju.