In New York I felt estranged by the materialism of society and by the art that embodied this society.”

I didn’t really like Pop Art, but in retrospect I can see that it influenced me. “When I came to New York all I seemed to see was Pop Art,” Kim said in a 2019 interview with Ocula Magazine. “Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol. He first went to New York in 1965 during the height of Pop art, and on the recommendation on his mentor Kim Whan-Ki he received a Rockefeller Foundation grant to study at the storied Art Students League, which had close links to the New York School of Abstract Expressionism, between 1966–68. Courtesy the artist and Tina Kim Galleryīut Kim, like many of artists of his generation, soon left Korea and began traveling around the world. Success for Kim came relatively quickly: he was included in the 1961 Paris Biennale, had his first solo show at the Press Center in Seoul in 1963, and participated in the 1965 Bienal de São Paulo. The movement’s other participants included Ha Chong-Hyun and Park Seo-Bo, who would soon be linked to the country’s famed 1970s Dansaekhwa movement. In 1958, Kim established the Modern Artists’ Association (renamed Actuel), and soon joined in the country’s Art Informel movement, led by the pioneering abstractionist Kim Whan-Ki. He studied painting at the College of Fine Art at Seoul National University, between 19, but his education was cut short by the Korean War, which lasted until 1953. Kim migrated to the southern part of the country after World War II to escape the communist regime that was taking hold in the north. Kim Tschang-Yeul was born on Decemin Maengsan, a county in the South Pyongan province, which is in modern-day North Korea and, at the time of the artist’s birth, was under Japanese control in a unified Korea.

While some seek the enhancement of ‘ego,’ I aim toward the extinction of the ego and look for the method of expressing it.” “By returning anger, anxiety, fear, and everything else to ‘emptiness,’ we experience peace and contentment. “The act of painting water drops is to dissolve all things within, to return to a transparent state of ‘nothingness,’” Kim once said, according to a press release for a 2019 exhibition at Tina Kim Gallery that explored the artist’s early career. Lou Stovall, Printmaker to Stars Such as Jacob Lawrence and Sam Gilliam, Dies at 86

Discovered by Kim Black