Whanki Kim

Biography

In 1935 a painting called “When the Skylarks Sing” was shown at the exhibition of the Second Section Association (Nikakai) in Tokyo. It shows a woman in a hanbok carrying a basket on her head: the figure is built from simplified geometric forms, and the contents of the basket are visible in full, because the basket is turned to a different angle. Its author, Whanki Kim, was twenty-two, and this was the first work he had sent to such a show. It won an award.

He was born on 27 February 1913 on the island of Kijwado, in Sinan County, Zenranan Province (Jeolla), the fourth child and only son of a wealthy landowner, Kim Sang-hyeon. After elementary school he was sent to Seoul to live with his older sister; then his family paid for his studies in Tokyo, where he attended Kinjō Middle School and learned to play the violin. In 1932 he returned home, and his father, who did not want him to study further, married him off. Kim decided to become an artist and secretly left for Japan.

In 1933 he enrolled in the three-year programme at the art department of Nihon University in Tokyo. In his second year he moved to the Avant-Garde Western Painting Institute, where the teachers were Japanese artists who had lived in Europe and were introducing their colleagues to Cubism, Futurism and Surrealism; his mentors included Togo Seiji and Tsuguharu Foujita. He became fascinated by Matisse and Picasso. His paintings of 1936, “House” and “Sauce Jar Terrace”, are built from elements of a Korean house: gates, paper sliding doors, walls, stairs, pottery, all painted deliberately flat. When the institute closed, in 1936 he and four other members, among them Gil Jin-seop, founded the Hakuban Society. His first solo exhibition took place at the Amagi Gallery in Tokyo in January 1937, a few months before he returned to Korea. “Rondo”, “Aria” and “White Seagull” (1937–1938) are already purely geometric compositions of intersecting shapes. “Rondo” is regarded as one of the earliest examples of abstract art in modern Korea, and in 2013 it was designated a Registered Cultural Property (No. 535).

In Seoul he drew close to writers and grew increasingly interested in traditional Korean art. In 1940 he took part in the Seoul exhibition of the Free Artists’ Association, and in 1941 he left it. By then he had divorced his first wife; in 1944 he married the writer Byun Dong-rim, the widow of the poet Yi Sang, who took the name Hyang-an Kim. He himself changed his art name to Su-hwa.

In 1948, with Yoo Youngkuk and Lee Kyusang, he founded the New Realism Group; Chang Ucchin, Paek Youngsu and Lee Jung-seob joined later. The members wanted to create a new kind of realist painting free of Japanese influence and outside the struggle between right and left. At the group’s second exhibition in 1949 he showed “Jar and Flowers”, in which a porcelain vessel is turned into a circle. He collected old Korean pottery, especially the white porcelain “moon jars” of the Joseon period, looked at them for hours at home and painted them in his canvases.

During the Korean War he left Seoul for the south and spent three years in a refugee camp in Busan. His wife recalled that he took those years hard and took to drinking, but he kept working. “Refugee Train” (1951) dates from then: the carriages are crammed with people, yet the colours are bright, reds and blues, whereas other artists painted the war in a more restrained and realistic manner. In 1953 he returned to Seoul, taught at the College of Fine Arts of Hongik University, painted jars again and again, and was elected to the Korean Academy.

From 1956 to 1959 he worked in Paris. Unlike many of his compatriots, who were sharply changed by the trip, he stayed faithful to his motifs: pottery, birds, mountains, deer, flowering plum. More and more often he painted in blue, the colour of his childhood on the island. In “Plum and Vase” (1957) a white vase outlined in black recalls the moon, and behind it is a branch of wild plum. I think he needed the Paris years in order to see what was Korean from the outside.

On his return in 1959 he became dean, and in 1960 president, of Hongik Art College. Teaching and administration took almost all his time, and conflicts with the board of directors left him disillusioned.

In 1963 he was Korea’s commissioner at the São Paulo Biennial and one of seven participants; for three paintings he received an Honorable Mention. There he saw the work of Adolph Gottlieb, who won the Grand Prize, and began to speak of the “internationalization” of Korean art. That same year he moved to New York, and the following year his wife joined him. Thanks to a grant from the Asia Society they settled in a studio on the Upper West Side. His paintings did not sell. He found support from Po Kim, John Pai and Nam June Paik, and from Gottlieb and Mark Rothko. He tried new materials: oil on newsprint, papier-mâché, collage.

By 1970 the “dot paintings” had appeared: he covered unprimed canvas with small irregular dots of oil paint thinned with turpentine. An early example, “Where, in What Form, Shall We Meet Again?” (1970), is named after a poem by his friend, the poet Kim Gwang-seop; the diluted paint produced an effect of blurred ink. For this work he won the Grand Prize at the first Korean Art Grand Award Exhibition. From 1971 the dots formed circles and curves, as in “Universe 05-IV-71 #200”. It was shown at his solo exhibition at the Poindexter Gallery in New York, where he exhibited every year until his death.

Whanki Kim died in New York on 25 July 1974, aged sixty-one. In 1978 his widow established the Whanki Foundation, and in 1992 she opened the Whanki Museum in Seoul, in a building designed by the architect Kyu Sung Woo.