Kim Chong-Hak

Busan Museum of Art proudly presents Highlighting Contemporary Artist III: Kim Chong-Hak in its efforts to shed light on prominent artists at the center of contemporary Korean modern art scene. Kim Chong-Hak (b. 1937) is widely acclaimed for his works that traverse across both abstract, figurative in style and realize the aura of subjects of nature in the most brilliant colors.

Unlike his body of works that’s widely known to the public, Kim’s early practice is centered on avant-garde modernism. While he embraced abstract art and was an active member of the modern art movement in his youth in 1960s, he began to explore figurative style in 1970s after he experienced experimental installation art in Japan and the coexistence of diverse genres of contemporary art in the US.

Returning to Korea in 1979, Kim enclosed himself in Seoraksan Mountain and met an important turning point in his art and career. Since then, he continued to experiment with expressing the embodied nature within himself for over 40 years. The entire surface of the work was filled with the passionate brush strokes and the materiality of the paint of the early abstract painting style, while at the same time, expressed in splendid colors as elements of nature that accentuated the sense of the figurative. Thus, as a representational painting based on abstraction, the natural subject expresses a state of “rhythmic vitality.”

Kim’s exploration into the essence of nature is rooted upon the traditional Korean aesthetics and this exploration penetrates his entire life. His works embrace the notion of “Sauisung” (Freehand Brushwork) and experiential folk arts sensibility of traditional Korean painting, and remind us that the origin of Korean culture comes from color.

This exhibition takes an exhaustive look across Kim’s entire oeuvre, drawings and from his key works to his folk art collections. Hopefully, Kim’s works which combine Western painting style with Korean traditional aesthetics and abstraction, along with the Korean abstract painting of Dansaekhwa, can offer a multi-dimensional context in art history through this exhibition.