30 Facts About Whanki Kim

Kim Whanki was a Korean painter and pioneering abstract artist.

Whanki Kim belongs to the first generation of Korean Abstract artists, mixing oriental concepts and ideals with abstraction.

Whanki Kim was an artist whose profound impact on the history of Korean art was seen in the first wave of abstract art.

Whanki Kim balanced keeping Korean values and beliefs close and incorporating new foreign techniques into his works, which evidently reflect his personal identity and Korea's national identity, impacted by the political and social conditions of the mid-1900s.

In 1935, Whanki Kim is awarded for his first submission to the prestigious Second Section Association, When the Skylarks Sing, marking his debut as an artist.

Whanki Kim even stayed an additional year in Japan as an assistant before returning to Korea in 1937.

Whanki Kim is said to have submitted six pieces: Island Tale, Still Life, Landscape 1, Landscape 2, Landscape at Atami, and Chamber Music before he left the Association in 1941.

In 1944, Whanki Kim, who had divorced his first wife, remarried Byun Dong-rim, who was a prodigiously talented writer and widow of poet Yi Sang.

Whanki Kim fled Seoul for safety in the South and entered a refugee camp for three years.

Whanki Kim's oil painting An Evacuation Train from 1951 is another example of his early abstraction work that reflects his distance from the Korean war.

When Kim Whanki returned to Seoul in 1953, his obsession with jars grew and even more than before.

Whanki Kim drew jars over and over again in his works including Jar and Poetry, White Jar and Woman, Jar, and Jar and Plum Blossoms.

Whanki Kim's journals show that his departure for Paris was something he had been planning for quite a while.

Away in France, Whanki Kim came to better understand and appreciate the unique qualities of Korea and Korean art.

Whanki Kim frequently traveled to new places to adopt new artistic techniques and incorporate them into his work, and his goal throughout his career was to reach this universality of a "boundaryless integration of Eastern and Western aesthetics".

Whanki Kim was tired of his works being viewed as either an abandonment of Korean values or as a weak imitation of "authentic" Western art.

Jar by Whanki Kim represented the transition from flat, patchy strokes to a building-up of layers.

Whanki Kim was able to combine the "Koreanness" of the Joseon Dynasty jar and elements of the abstract expressionist movement.

Whanki Kim found himself teaching and performing administrative duties more often than he was concentrating on art.

Whanki Kim often felt frustrated during this time because of conflicts with other board members and the lack of connection between reality and what dreams he had for the institutions of art.

Hyang-an Whanki Kim joined Whanki Kim in New York the following year.

When Whanki Kim arrived in New York, he began to experiment with new materials, like newspaper pages and oil paints.

Whanki Kim was curious about how different oil paints reacted with the oil on the newspaper, which created a "shifting, moving sense of paint laying on top of a surface" compared to the absorption effect of watercolor paint, which led to his interest in paper-mache.

Whanki Kim took pride in the fact that he conserved "Koreanness" into his art as the oil paint on paper mimicked the mottled surface of pottery from Joseon dynasty.

Whanki Kim continued to produce "dot paintings" on larger-sized canvases and experimented with different colors, especially with range of blue hues.

The work was included in Whanki Kim's solo show at New York's Poindexter Gallery, where he continued to show annually, until his death in 1974.

In Universe, Whanki Kim painted repeating rows of circles made of dots that capture the essence of waves pulsating on the shore.

American paintings tend to have that "all-at-once" aspect, while Whanki Kim's work is constantly dynamic and there is an implicit sense of movement at all times.

Whanki Kim's pieces became less figurative and more abstract with linear horizontals and verticals and diagonal arrangements.

Further, Whanki Kim designed this piece so that the audience could picture the movement of shimmering heavenly bodies mimicked by the dynamic dots.