(Magsan, Korea, 1929 – 2021 Seoul, Southern Korea)
Recurrence, 1997, signed and dated on the side, oil and acrylic on canvas, 194 x 161 cm, on the stretcher

This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from the Estate of Kim Tschang-Yeul, France

Provenance:
European Private Collection

“I lived with the seriousness of someone who has caught a tiger by the tail…”

RECURRENCE

Kim Tschang-Yeul passed away in early January 2021, at the age of 91. He was a central figure among the generation of artists at the vanguard of postwar Korean modernism, a painter who spent the past five decades focusing on his iconic depictions of water drops. He is considered one of the preeminent figures in the establishment of contemporary Korean art on the international scene, alongside Nam June Paik and Lee Ufan. After living in Pyongyang, Seoul, New York and eventually Paris, the water drop became the starting point for a singular and iconic body of work, which stands at the confluence of lyrical abstraction, Pop Art and Chinese calligraphy. His minimalistic and lucid limpid œuvre subtly fuses Taoist wisdom, modern conceptual irony and the tragedy of war.

Early years in Korea

Born in Maengsan, in modern-day North Korea in 1929, Kim began studying calligraphy with his grandfather at the age of four. He was a key member of a generation of artists who adopted radical practices in the 1950s in South Korea and then spread them beyond its borders. Showing an early talent for art, he began an art degree at Seoul National University in 1949, but his studies were interrupted by the Korean War, an experience that marked him forever.

“All I could think of was weeping or yelling”, he said in an interview in 2018. “I went back to painting in order to vent my rage.”

In the coming years, Kim Tschang-Yeul channeled the violence of the conflict into abstractions made of slashing marks and brooding colors. Kim led the Korean “Art Informel” movement in the 1950s and 1960s. This movement greatly inspired many avant-garde artists of the next generation in rejecting the conservative values imposed on them by Korean military dictatorship, such as Lee Ufan, Name June Paik and Park Seo-Bo. Shortly after his participation in the Paris Biennale in 1961 and the São Paulo Biennale in 1965, Kim moved to New York and studied there from 1966 to 1968. His time spent in New York allowed him to interact with and be inspired by the Pop Art movement, which was a significant influence. Because of his years abroad, Kim developed his art outside of the Seoul and Tokyo art scene, thus developing his unique style in parallel to the “Dansaekhwa” movement.

From New York to Paris

Kim Tschang-Yeul was part of a generation of Korean artists that travelled beyond East Asia in order to develop a more universal approach to painting. In 1965, he received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation which enabled him to move to New York in order to study at the Art Students’ League of New York from 1966 to 1968. Kim’s years spent in New York allowed him to interact with the overwhelming visibility of Pop Art and Minimalist sculpture, which impeded the artist’s pursuit of an idiosyncratic style.

Eventually settling in Paris after participating in the Avant-Garde Festival with help from Nam June Paik, Kim Tschang-Yeul began painting water, building upon the fluid shapes he was already experimenting with. It was in Paris, in fact, that the artist first embarked on his monumental water drop painting titled Événement de la Nuit (1972), where a single oversized water drop hangs, its shadow projected against the dark ground; within the droplet is a reflection of the window of the artist’s studio. Ever since, over fifty years, he continued to present works featuring water droplets that would become his trademark.

Water Drops and Calligraphy

As the story goes, he was in his 40s, indigent and working at nighttime in a former stable in a Paris suburb. Unhappy with a painting, he splashed water on it intending to clear away the paint. When he returned in the morning, he was transfixed by the drops remaining on the canvas and reflecting the morning light. “It was spectacular”, he said in a recent interview. “It was like a symphony. I took pictures of them and started thinking about how to express them on a canvas. Thus, began my lifelong task.”

For Kim, the waterdrop is a sort of meditation, a way to free himself from the scars the war experience had left him with. There is something almost obsessive in these 48 year-long repetitions of a single motif. It’s a never-ending struggle to come to terms with his past, to turn “anger, unease, and fear into emptiness”, as he wrote, in order to “experience peace and harmony.”

“For me, thinking about transparent water drops is an act of making bad things go away. I’ve dissolved and erased horrible memories by painting them countless times”, the artist once said. And again, “Painting water drops is to heal all memories, all anguishes, anxieties by water”.

Once he found that motif, critical and commercial success came fast, and he was soon exhibiting regularly in Europe, North America and Asia.

Since Événement de la Nuit (Nighttime Event), the artist has dedicated his life to exploring the transparent drops through light and shadow, experimenting with various mediums such as oil paint, acrylic, watercolor and traditional Korean ink, “meok”, on linen canvas, burlap sack and wood.

“Whereas an actual drop of water will eventually be absorbed into the surface of the material and fade away, Kim’s carpet of dew remains in place forever, inviting his audience to contemplate the ethereality of existence and the endurance of art,” art critic and journalist Barbara Pollack wrote.

“… Once you have caught hold of a tiger’s tail, you have to follow it all the way to the end, on pain of being eaten alive.”

Kim Tschang-Yeul’s work has been shown around the world for more than fifty years, recently culminating in several important retrospectives at the Gwangju Museum of Art, Korea, 2014; Taiwan National Museum of Fine Art, Taichung, 2012; Busan Museum of Art, Korea, 2009; National Art Museum of China, Beijing, 2006; and Jeu de Paume National Gallery, Paris, 2004. Kim donated 220 works of art to Jeju Island, where the Kim Tschang-Yeul Art Museum dedicated to the artist was established in 2016.

In the late 1980s, for his Recurrence series, Kim started to merge the water drop motif with the traditional practice of calligraphy. “I learned the Thousand-Character Classic from my grandfather before entering primary school. When I was around 60, I started to paint on the theme of Recurrence, which means going back. First, it means going back to childhood, and second, going back to the East,” Kim said. Recurrence is also interpreted as a significant aesthetic ground bridging image and text, process and form, content and concept, East and West, abstract and figurative.

The work presented here is a particularly beautiful example. Dating to 1997, it was created in a period of high maturity in the artist’s work. Rendered with extreme, hyper realistic care, Kim Tschang Yeul’s drops seem to hang atop the hemp canvas, leaving a trail of moisture. Like real trompe l’oeil, they glimmer with light and cast shadows, and though vivid and present, they always seem on the verge of evanescing.