Kim Alongside Nam June Paik and Lee Ufan, Tschang-Yeul is considered one of Korea's best-known contemporary artists artist . He has been committed to the arts since the beginning of his creative for career and was inducted into the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and in 2013, receiving an award for for his cultural achievements. Justified, considering not only his artistic work, but also the political circumstances under which he lived.
This includes the then Japanese-occupied Korea - today's North Korea. After the partition of Korea, he was arrested as a young man and and after 10 days of imprisonment fled to the then Seoul, which was again under US control.
Kim Tschang-Yeul studied art at Seoul National University. In 1958, he founded the Modern Artists' Association and joined the Informel movement, led by Whanki Kim, a pioneering Korean abstract artist .
The Rockefeller Foundation enabled him to study at the Art Students League of New York on a scholarship. Subsequently, Kim Tschang-Yeul moved to Paris, where he would live until his death in 2021.
Perhaps the artist shows through its delicate nature how fragile life itself is and how delicate and beautiful a small drop of water on can be such a coarse canvas.
Pia Maria Lukas-Larsen - Art Historian M.A
The meditative power of a drop of water
But so turbulent, how his life is briefly described here, was his art not. Quite the opposite. It radiates a natural calm.
Kim Tschang-Yeul filled his works with the Taoist principles of his education and characterized water as an amorphous entity imbued with the power of dissolution and purification.
The water drops set in fine painting on the coarse canvas seem so fragile and at the same time firmly mounted, as if you could take them how marbles from the picture support. One would think that such a rough surface texture is dangerous for a natural water drop.
Its purity could burst or even be absorbed by the porous structures and yet it withstands decades in this picture for . Each drop is individual, so how it it would also be in nature.
The works of Kim Tschang-Yeul nudge a kind of meditation and so can be drawn from the contemplation wisdom of life: The One known water drop that sets water in motion to a ripple. The water, which as an element of nature symbolizes life itself.
All these parallels can be drawn in these nine different water drops on of the gray-brown canvas. Perhaps not surprising, that the artist has made this very means of design his own, if one looks at his life path to it.
He as artist, as a free and creative mind, lived in a world with strong boundaries and political regulations. But the drop remains and thus gives the viewer not only joy about the beauty of a drop of water, but even hope and confidence on a better world.
