About the author

Born in Changwon, South Gyeongsang Province in 1947, Kim Young-Won entered the Department of Sculpture at Hongik University in 1968 and graduated in 1974. In 1969 (during his second year of college), Kim made his official debut as an artist with his piece, Prelude, a realist sculpture of a female nude, which received an honorable mention at the National Art Exhibition of Korea. From that burgeoning experience and well-received accolade, Kim began to build his reputation as a leading sculptor by continuously participating in the National Art Exhibition of Korea yearly, while also winning awards at prominent art events across the country:  of note, the Contest of the Mokwoohoe Fine Arts Association, JoongAng Fine Arts Prize, Dong-A Art Festival, and the Korean Art Grand Award Exhibition. In 2009, Kim was chosen to produce the statue of King Sejong installed in Gwanghwamun Square, central Seoul, helping him gain wide acclaim among the Korean public.

Although many Korean sculptors begin their careers by studying and producing realist human sculptures, most eventually shift to producing abstract works. But that is not the case for Kim Young-Won, who has now been exploring the human form for more than fifty years since graduating from college. Immediately after graduation, he began using his works to directly address various social problems. Then in the late 1970s, he launched his Gravity Nongravity series, which metaphorically examined ontological issues related to human existence. At his first solo exhibition in 1980, Kim moved beyond the conventions of figurative sculpture with his highly realistic images of people, which expressed the ongoing transformation of humans into objects in contemporary society. In 1989, he received the Sun Misul Award and was chosen by Monthly Art as one of the representative Korean artists of the 1980s. Seeking to improve his health, he started studying Zen and practicing qigong meditation in 1990. This soon led to his next creative breakthrough, when he fused his art activities with the principles and physical movements of meditation through controlled movements of the body in what he called “Third Art.” He received considerable attention for his Zen performance and exhibited works at the 1994 Bienal de São Paulo. In other artistic pursuits outside of the global biennale circuits, since around 2005, Kim has presented his Shadow of Shadow series of highly unique sculptures of the human form, which combine elements of figurative representation and Zen abstraction. This series embodies Kim’s belief in Eastern philosophy, and particularly the inherent unity of seemingly oppositional concepts such as mind and matter, form and formlessness, and being and nonbeing. 

Some of his most notable exhibitions include his solo exhibitions at Sungkok Art Museum (2005), Sun Gallery (2008), Gyeongnam Art Museum (2011), and the Dongdaemun Design Plaza (2016), as well as his joint exhibition with Novello Finotti in Padua, Italy (2013). In addition to the statue of King Sejong in Gwanghwamun Square, he also produced the statues of ten former presidents now installed at Cheongnamdae. Finally, his large sculptures of human figures are installed in a number of prominent public spaces, including Tongyeong Nammangsan Sculpture Park, Ilsan Lake Park, the sculpture park of the World Ceramic Exposition Korea 2001 in Gwangju, Gimpo Sculpture Park, World Cup Noeul Park, the Daehakro campus of Hongik University, Dongdaemun Design Plaza, and a public square in Padua, Italy.

1947: Born in Changwon, South Gyeongsang Province.

1968–1977: Undergraduate and graduate study in the Department of Sculpture at Hongik University.

1969–1981: Regularly participated in the annual National Art Exhibition of Korea, receiving various honorable mentions and special selections.

1981: Appointed as professor at Chungbuk National University. 

1989: Won the Sun Misul Award.

1994: Participated in the 22nd Bienal de São Paulo, where he was interviewed for Brazilian television. 

1995–2012: Taught as a Professor in the College of Fine Arts at Hongik University. 

1999: Produced the March 1^st Independence Movement Memorial.

2002: Won the Kim Se Choong Sculpture Award.

2005: Led the publication of Gyegan Jogak.

2009: Produced the statue of King Sejong in Gwanghwamun Square. 

2009: Won the Moonshin Art Award.

2010: Inaugurated as Dean of the College of Fine Arts at Hongik University.

2011: Publication of The Sculpture of Super-consciousness and Life: Kim Young Won (Changwon: Gyeongnam Art Museum).

2012: Publication of The Sculpture of Kim Young Won (Paju: Esoope) and Kim Young-Won: TEXT (Seoul: Hongik Museum of Art).

2013: Held Kim Young-Won e Novello Finotti: Scultori a confronto nella citta di Padua, a joint exhibition with Novello Finotti, in Padua, Italy.

2015:  Produced statues of ten Korean presidents now installed at Cheongnamdae. 

2016: Held the exhibition Kim Young-Won Sculpture: I-To Future at the Dongdaemun Design Plaza (DDP).

Kim Young-Won: Human Sculptures 

 as Keywords for Humanity and the World

Kim Yisoon (Professor, Hongik University) 

I. Foreword 

Kim Young-Won stands out from the field of Korean contemporary sculpture for a number of reasons. First and foremost, Kim is one of the few contemporary sculptors who has focused primarily on figurative human sculptures throughout his distinguished career. Moreover, Kim is one of the few living sculptors who is widely known to the Korean public, thanks in large part to his iconic statue of King Sejong in Gwanghwamun Square, a central location for heritage sites and tourism. As a supremely gifted sculptor who has spent his entire career sculpting the human form, Kim was the obvious choice to capture the noble, dignified and mythified figure of King Sejong, Korea’s most revered monarch. While most Korean contemporary sculptors start out making sculptures based on the human form and its physiology, while at university or early in their career, they typically diverge into more abstracted forms as their career progresses. But Kim Young-Won has now been continuously producing human facsimile sculptures for more than fifty years. Notably, however, Kim’s para-realist sculptures occupy a wide spectrum of styles and expressions, ranging from craftman-like realism to deconstructed forms and arbitrary compositions. Consistently transcending basic representational aesthetics, Kim’s human sculptures exude a distinct artistic sensibility that is virtually unprecedented, not only in Korea, but one could argue throughout the history of sculpture as a global practice. Thus, our research team from the Korean Artist Digital Archive project has worked diligently to comprehensively organize Kim’s unique oeuvre in order to help promote both the artist and his work at the international level.  

Many firsthand materials related to Kim’s artworks are extant, including the works themselves, scholarly criticism, exhibition prefaces, magazine profiles, and newspaper articles. The definitive publication on his work is The Sculpture of Super-consciousness and Life: Kim Young Won, which is the catalogue for his 2011 special exhibition at Gyeongnam Art Museum, which featured many of his representative works up to that time.^[1] Another important book collecting various records is Kim Young-Won: TEXT, published in 2012 by Hongik Museum of Art to accompany the exhibition to commemorate Kim’s retirement from his professorship at Hongik University.^[2] Then in 2015, Kim Sue-jin provided a comprehensive survey of Kim’s works and career in her MA thesis.^[3] Even with this abundance of scholarly material and exhibition catalogues out there to consume and analyze, many articles and publications covering Kim’s early solo exhibitions remain scattered, making it difficult to formulate a comprehensive view of his sculpture’s impact aesthetically, culturally and in debates about realism. Perhaps most significantly, the artist himself possesses some of the only known materials relating to his “Zen sculptures” and performances, a crucial yet neglected area of his work. Furthermore, records of Kim’s works were found to contain many inconsistencies, even in basic details such as the titles, materials, and sizes. Adding to the confusion in gathering a more holistic picture of this canonical and pathbreaking Korean sculptor, Kim himself has occasionally changed the titles of existing works or produced new editions of his works with different materials. Thus, presenting a need to properly assess and organize the works of this important artist. 

             For this research project, we thoroughly surveyed and intuit all of Kim Young-Won’s known works, as well as any available materials and references relating to those works. Through this near systematic art historical study, we have created a detailed timeline that charts the progression of Kim’s life as it intersects, points beyond and surges through his art. Significantly, all of these materials were digitized to ensure that they will serve as the foundation for many future studies of Kim’s work, ultimately providing the basis for non-Koreanists to encounter his work, expand his reputation abroad as a leading Korean sculptor and link his practice to a wider world history of art. This article briefly summarizes the process and results of the Korean Artist Digital Archive project, before providing an in-depth examination and analysis of the art of Kim Young-Won. 

II. Research Process and Results 

This research project was conducted by the Korea Arts Management Service (KAMS) as part of the Korean Artist Digital Archive. The objective of the project was to survey and catalog the complete works of Kim Young-Won in order to further establish his unique contribution to Korean art history, worldwide sculptural practices when thought of comparatively and in a global context, and his significance as one of the leading sculptors in Korean cultural history. To this end, we identified and cataloged a total of 871 works, including sculptures, public sculptures, two-dimensional works, and performances. In addition, we collected 422 supplementary materials (e.g., photographs, artist’s notes, exhibition brochures and leaflets, etc.) and 556 reference materials (e.g., exhibition catalogs, books, and periodicals), and also conducted extensive interviews with critics and the artist himself. Through this process, we created a comprehensive chronology of Kim’s career, which documents 430 exhibitions and 212 other important personal or cultural events. In addition, 86 citations are documented by extraction of content from important literature devoted to this artist and, as a result, this data is carefully examined, scrutinized and interlarded into this dossier. All of this information was inputted to create the digital catalog of Kim Young-Won, which includes 2,577 entries (as of January 28, 2021). Finally, using the data from the chronology, we analyzed the characteristics of Kim’s works by period and wrote a comprehensive critical analysis of his art and career. 

The goal of this project was to systematically catalogue, with obvious opened-ness to future researchers and their heterogeneric interventions into Kim Young-Won’s entire oeuvre, that this vast collection of work nonetheless, following on from 1969 to 2020 is the advent of exhaustive archive retrieval, historicism and analysis. When Kim debuted and won his first award at the National Art Exhibition of Korea this set in motion a long and illustrious career of a sculptor that deserves further encounters by non-Korean audiences. In sum total there were 871 documented works reviewed and catalogued, these comprise 514 three-dimensional works, 292 two-dimensional works, 44 installations, 17 performances, and 4 photographs. For each work, the title, year of production, material, size, and edition were entered into the digital archive, along with photos. Since most of Kim’s works are three-dimensional, we attempted to include multiple photographs whenever possible, to show the work from various angles. We also gathered contemporaneous photos of Kim’s exhibitions and exhaustively traced his public sculptures at various installation and display sites, which are scattered across Korea and overseas. 

The two main sources for this project were The Sculpture of Super-consciousness and Life: Kim Young Won, which is the catalogue for Kim’s 2011 solo exhibition at Gyeongnam Art Museum, and The Sculpture of Kim Young Won, published in 2012.^[4] In addition, we also carefully examined many primary records from auctions and exhibitions (both group and solo shows) that Kim had participated in, including catalogs, brochures, leaflets, and auction records. More works were uncovered through our interviews with the artist, including works created after 2012 and earlier works that had been omitted from the aforementioned documents. In the course of compiling the archive, we were also able to correct various errors and inconsistencies in the information about Kim’s works. 

Two of the most important insights to emerge from our investigation are the artist’s tendency to produce multiple editions of certain works and the surprising abundance of works of his other than sculptures, including two-dimensional works and documented performance pieces. Rather than carving hard materials like wood or stone, Kim often creates his works by shaping or amassing pliable materials, such as clay or plaster. As such, he has sometimes been known to make multiple versions of a single work, using different materials. Until now, however, Kim did not attempt to track or organize these various editions in either chronological order or through a succinct studio archiving system. Thus, during our study, we consulted with the artist about each work in order to determine whether he had made multiple editions. The resulting data provides valuable information for analyzing Kim’s artistic practices and appraising the authenticity of his works, and should thus serve as a valuable guide for future archiving and analysis of sculptors who create multiple editions of their works. In addition, our research also provided an essential reminder that Kim is more than just a sculptor, having also produced numerous two-dimensional works, installations, and performance pieces. While many videos of Kim’s performances are known to exist, they had never before been collected or organized. By classifying all of Kim’s diverse works by genre, this project provides the most detailed and comprehensive view of his art ever assembled. 

Beyond the artworks themselves, a total of 422 materials related to Kim’s art were also collected and documented, including 39 exhibition leaflets, 104 exhibition brochures, 158 photographs, 49 sketches, 14 artist’s notebooks, and 58 miscellaneous items.^[5] The project also accumulated 556 reference materials that can be used to confirm Kim’s works and activities, including 284 exhibition catalogs, 20 art books, 125 newspaper articles, 82 periodicals, 8 theses or dissertations, 4 academic journal articles, 28 videos, and 5 web pages. The materials other than artworks proved to be essential sources for identifying missing works, compiling Kim’s exhibition history (430 exhibitions), and creating a chronology of his entire corpus of work (212 entries). For future research, all of this data and images were digitized, and important texts were excerpted and documented through 86 citations.

If we consider the aforementioned data as a major segment to Kim’s life’s work, we also conducted numerous interviews with critics and the artist himself. Indeed, through the interviews we conducted, Kim Young-Won closely collaborated on this project, playing a crucial role in identifying multiple editions of works and confirming the titles of works that had been recorded differently in various documents that would have most likely been lost or eluded inclusion in this database and paper. Most importantly, the interviews enabled the artist to personally describe his work process and to explain the world of his art in its entirety, a kind of autoethnographic narration for his creative process. Finally, interviews with three esteemed critics who have previously written about Kim’s work—Kim Bokyoung, Yoon Jinsup, and Hong Kai—were used to produce two videos about his art, one for academic purposes and one for the general public.

As of this writing, the database for Kim Young-Won’s archive contains a total of 2,577 items: 871 works, 422 related materials, 556 reference materials, 430 exhibition listings, 212 chronology entries, and 86 citations. All of these items are organized and organically linked to the best of our knowledge, so that the entry for a certain work, for example, connects to the exhibition where the work was presented, the exhibition catalogue, and other related content fit into a larger matrix of his extensive oeuvre. These intuitive links make it easy to track the exhibition history and title changes for any given work. 

By tracing, organizing, and collecting this vast trove of information, including categorizing each work by type, this research project has provided a solid foundation for all future research on the art of Kim Young-Won. As a result, we expect studies of Kim’s work to grow and proliferate new interventions into his work’s importance and its wider global impact in art history generally and for sculpture specifically. Rightfully boosting his status within the flow of contemporary Korean sculpture, our modest hope is that the research will eventually be translated into English and other languages, allowing it to be used more effectively in the international promotion of the artist and his works position, chronotype and eminence within the larger world art history canon. 

Finally, it is vital to point out that the archive also includes some works that were presented at auctions but were later determined to be counterfeits. Our in-depth investigation, conducted with the full cooperation of the artist, sought to conclusively identify and register every edition of every artwork that was genuinely produced by Kim himself. As stipulated, strenuously throughout, the database will certainly play an crucial role in identifying fakes and replicas that may appear be exhibited or come to market in the future, thus ensuring the legitimate distribution of Kim’s works.

III. Development of Kim Young-Won’s Works 

For the first half of the twentieth century, most Korean sculptors followed the style of realism, a kind of shorthand for verisimilitude and anatomical proportionality exemplified by the works of Kim Bokjin (1901–1940). After Korea’s liberation in 1945 from Japan, some Korean sculptors began to deviate from objective depictions of reality and human form, but there remained a strong emphasis on lyrical realism[김1] . By the 1970s, when Kim Young-Won started his career, the field of Korean art was dominated by modernism, exemplified by “Dansaekhwa” paintings (i.e., Korean monochrome abstraction), installations, and abstract sculptures.^[6] Eschewing the abstract works of the mainstream and what was in vogue globally at the time, Kim focused on figurative depictions of humans, a predilection for his creativity and a genre for sculpture in Korea that he advocated fiercely and led to his founding the Korean Figurative Sculpture Association in 1977. At the time, “figurative sculpture” was a broad term that referred to any sculpture depicting a person, whether realistic or not. But the 1980s saw the rise of a new type of realistic representational art called “hyeongsang art.”^[7] Showing his allegiance with this new trend or genre within sculpture, Kim left the Korean Figurative Sculpture Association to join the Present·Image group of hyeongsang artists, with whom he held various exhibitions with. But Kim’s association with the group was relatively short-lived, reflecting his belief that the creation of art is inherently an individual pursuit and not communal activity or something he needed to be part of, a coterie that is sometimes a defining catalyst for a movement; rather than continue participating in group activities, he maintained his independence within the art world for some fifty years, amassing a successful career that can be roughly divided into four periods based on the form and content of his works. 

1. Realist Human Sculptures as Critiques of Reality

As a student at Hongik University, Kim Young-Won learned and practiced the realist style of sculpture, producing lifelike human images with naturalistic expressions. As his skills developed, Kim was invited to participate in the College Art Exhibition and the National Art Exhibition of Korea, where he primarily showed sculptures of people with muscular, sturdy bodies, such as Breeze, Land and Sea Breezes, The Dawn of the Mudflat, and An Open Field. These early works followed the conventional style of representational sculpture and painting of the time, but Kim was already starting to expand his creative conscience, as demonstrated by A Sculpture of the Head (originally entitled Face of a Prisoner on Death Row), which he showed at the graduation exhibition of Hongik University in 1974.^[8] This expansion continued with A Tree with Eyes (1975) from the Today exhibition, and A Boy, I Met Yesterday (1976) from the first exhibition of the Korean Figurative Sculpture Association (1977). Recalling this period, Kim later wrote, “My school days were a time of vague anxiety and fear about a dark and opaque future, like being in a thick fog on a dark night. Facing the undeniable reality right in front of me, when tear gas, school closures, crackdowns, surveillance, and mistrust became commonplace, I was compelled to pay close attention to social issues.”^[9] Indeed, many of Kim’s early works can now be seen as expressions of social criticism or if viewed as civic consciousness than a kind of “social realism” for sculpture (not to be confused with socialist realism found in Communist societies such as China and the Soviet Union in the late Cold War period).Thus his mode of social participation sometimes was imbued in his creative tendencies.  

Given the oppressive political atmosphere of the late 1970s, however, most artists were forced to address social topics indirectly, through metaphor and metonymy. Within this context, Kim entered a new phase of his career in 1977, when he submitted Sight Modification for the second Space Art Grand Prize Exhibition for Sculpture. With this work, Kim began to explore a new theme that he called “gravity nongravity,” which became the name of his forthcoming series of sculptures depicting healthy teens and young men exercising or hanging from a pull-up bar. The early works of the Gravity Nongravity series recall the style of classic Greek sculpture, showing lean young men with idealized anatomies straining to pull themselves up or hanging down from a pull-up bar. Rendered with fiber-reinforced polymer composites, or “FRP,” the human bodies are highly objectified, with smoothly polished skin and blank facial expressions, as if their consciousness has been erased. Although these works depict young men with muscular physiques, they actually diverged from the classical statues of ancient Greece and the Renaissance, which represented the Western anthropocentric notion that humans resemble gods. For Kim, these objectified human figures suggested the bleak political conditions of the time, even as Korea began to experience intensifying economic development through industrialization and the “necropolitics” of using Korean soldiers via the country’s involvement in the Vietnam War. This mode of expression became more overt in the 1980s, when Kim presented human figures with no facial features at all, such as Gravity Nongravity: Self Portrait (1986).

2. Gravity Nongravity: Deconstruction and Restoration

Kim’s style changed more dramatically in the late 1980s, in conjunction with the major social changes that were sweeping through Korea at the time. While he continued working on his Gravity Nongravity series, the new entries in the series carried momentous subtitles, such as Birth, Restoration, and Republic. For these works, Kim once again sculpted human figures with seemingly flawless anatomy, but he then purposely disassembled and reassembled them. Through these deconstructed human bodies, Kim conveyed the turmoil, conflict, and division of the period, when public demonstrations for democracy were often violently suppressed by the military government. Moreover, by brazenly shattering his own works, the artist sought a new exit or escape from this polarized society, just as new life can only be born by introspection and seclusion.

Produced through an exhausting process of decimation and restoration to the human form, these works embodied an era marked by rapid change and the explosion of repressed emotion. Perhaps not surprisingly, Kim Young-Won did not produce these works for very long. In fact, these radical deconstructed works enabled him to break away from the Gravity Nongravity theme that he had focused on for the past decade. Kim once said in response to this time in his life that, “Seeking more contemporary and unique encounters, at a time when no one was making realist sculpture, I had no choice but to completely destroy the pieces that I had been working on, and then reassemble the fragments in a new way. Through this extreme negation, I’m trying to achieve a world of absolute affirmation that transcends physicality and spirituality.”^[10] The resultant process of destroying and rebuilding not only reflected the society of the time, to borrow an economist notion by Schumpeter, a kind of “creative destruction,” but also such annihilation of the process marked a crucial turning point in Kim’s career, changing the entire trajectory of his art. 

3. Qigong Meditation and the “Third Art”

In 1990, Kim Young-Won began practicing “qigong” meditation (meaning “working with qi”), which combines meditative thought with controlled breathing and placid movement. He soon extended qigong into his art production, using its basic gestures within time and space to express his inner consciousness. At the 1994 Bienal de São Paulo, Kim integrated his own meditation into an installation called Art of Awakening. Describing this work, Kim said that he hoped that the “art world will provide a path for us to move forward to a great awakening, overcoming matter, elevating the mind, and enhancing the soul.”^[11] He became immersed in Eastern philosophy, and began quoting the British philosopher Alfred Whitehead’s claim that Western philosophy consisted of a “series of footnotes to Plato.” Starting in the mid-twentieth century, many artists and scholars around the world began to embrace Eastern philosophy as an escape from the human-centered rationalism of Western thought. Within this context, Kim was particularly fascinated by Taoism as an opposition to Plato’s “Theory of Ideas.”  

In the 1970s, many Korean artists began infusing their works with elements of Eastern philosophy, and Taoism in particular. Along with experimental works by artists such as Kim Ku-lim (b. 1936) and Lee Kun Yong (b. 1942), Dansaekhwa painters like Park Seo-Bo (b. 1931) used Taoism as the basis for their works that emphasized self-cultivation through repetitive actions.^[12] Critic Lee Yil (1932–1997) also incorporated Eastern philosophy into his theory of “pan-naturalism,” which explained Korean artists’ attempts to break away from Western-centric styles and works in search of art that represented their own national identity. But also complements and overlaps American color field painters and abstract expressionists own phlegmatic and existential thinking drawn on to philosophize their work. 

But unlike his predecessors in the 1970s, Kim was primarily interested in the non-duality of Eastern philosophy, which posits the ultimate unity of mind and body and the whole and the part, as opposed to the dichotomies of Western logic of say Kant. For Kim, this conception originated from qigong meditation, which he began practicing in order to restore his health. As his meditation training progressed, Kim began to realize the artistic possibilities of certain gestures that responded to the flow of qi, the essential force or energy of life. He thus began presenting performance works that incorporated qigong gestures, which somewhat resemble dance or martial arts. By thus visualizing the flow of invisible energy as art, he creatively used the Western art form of performance to deconstruct the system of Western thought based on reason. In addition, through performance itself, these works also consisted of objects bearing the traces of the artist’s movements, which in turn represented the energy channeled through qigong meditation, such as clay cylindrical poles (e.g., Sculpture Zen and Drawing Zen) or two-dimensional surfaces covered with oil paint (e.g., Cosmic Force). In these works, waves of hidden energy are realized as waves, clouds, or winds. Kim claims that these unconditioned and spontaneous images represent the dynamic spirit of Koreans, much like the equestrian nomadic tribes depicted in the murals of Muyongchong Tomb (Goguryeo) and Cheonmachong Tomb (Silla).   

In addition to such performance works, Kim continued to produce various types of sculpture in this period, ranging from extremely realistic human sculptures to his new Make a Deep Bow series, which depicted people bowing or seated in meditation. He eventually integrated these meditation-based works in large installations (including one at the ARKO Art Center in 1997), which he dubbed the “Third Art.”^[13] For Kim, “Third Art” was an entirely new realm of art that used meditation to renounce all ties to a worldly life. By transferring qigong meditation from his personal life into his art, Kim shifted the pole of his work from West to East, and from social critique to philosophical contemplation. He thus successfully enacted a postmodern deconstruction of Western rationalism by contemplating Eastern philosophy based on self-cultivation. 

4. Shadow of Shadow: Human Sculptures That Transcend the Human Form 

In the 2000s, Kim Young-Won moved forward with another major change, transitioning from Gravity Nongravity to a new series entitled Shadow of Shadow. Kim wished to share his practice of qigong meditation with a wider audience but works like Zen Performance and Art-Zen showed him the limits of trying to communicate with a general audience that was not familiar with the principles of Zen philosophy. At the same time, he sought to overcome the disjunctive methodology of Gravity Nongravity through new forms of sculpture derived from a dialectic process, obliquely bring him back to German philosophy and Hegel dialectical materialism whether he acknowledged this shift in thinking. He also hoped to dissuade people from interpreting his works as some type of personal mental or physical training, rather than merely being an artistic activity. The result was the Shadow of Shadow series, which Kim viewed as the integration – the convergence of Eastern empiricism with a Western logic. Combining the abstraction of Zen Performance with the realist depictions of Gravity Nongravity, Kim created unexpected human forms that visualized the symbiotic flow of qi with the body.

How can a “shadow of shadow” exist? How can one express a shadow with physical materials? Kim explained that “shadow” was primarily meant as a talking point, perhaps relating to the famous allegory of “罔兩問景曰”  (“WangliangQuestions the Shadow”) from Zhuangzi’s Qiwulun (The Adjustment of Controversies).^[14]

While clearly representing human beings, the forms of the Shadow of Shadow series are not realistically created. In fact, the towering figures installed in public spaces would be better described as surrealist in classification. Like relief sculptures that have been removed from the wall and erected in space, the figures are carved three-dimensionally on the front only, with the reverse side left flat and blank. As such, they realize human images as objects, while also conveying the impression of stopped time and space. In some cases, he combined relief sculptures of humans in all directions, yielding unique human figures with no discernible front or back. The surreal ambience is enhanced by the smoothness of the human forms or the addition of brilliant colors. Although they reveal only one side of the human body, the works never appear awkward or unnatural. Moreover, with their unique shape and form, the figures transcend gender, which is usually a prominent feature of human sculptures.

Exploring the relation between front and back, three-dimensional and relief sculpture, and the real and surreal, Kim Young-Won’s Shadow of Shadow series seeks to transcend all existing concepts of human images. These works are the culmination of the artist’s contemplation of some of the core principles of Eastern thought, including yin and yang from the I Ching, the Taoist notion that being and non-being generate one another, and the Buddhist belief that “form does not differ from emptiness.” Offering an entirely new way of representing the human body, they exist outside the trajectory of both Korean and Western human-inspired sculptural objects. 

IV. Epilogue

Born in 1947, Kim Young-Won has lived through one of the most tumultuous periods in Korean history. Growing up in a poor rural area amidst the chaos of post-independence, he suffered through the Korean War, followed by the social upheaval of the April Revolution of 1960 and the military coup of May 16, 1961. The economic devastation cast a long shadow over his childhood, just as he was beginning to understand the world on his own terms. Thanks to his exceptional creative talent and recherché views, Kim was able to escape to art school, only to be crushed anew by the social and political oppression of the 1970s: disbandment of unions, infiltration of student democracy movements, dread of stealth North Korean missions into the South and general travel bans on nearly all citizens. Unable to directly address the harsh reality, the Korean art world instead emphasized the search for purity and modernity. To this end, a new generation of young artists embraced abstract art, rebelling against the older generation of established artists. This divide was relatively short-lived, however, likely because of the strong overall influence of Western art at the time.

After graduating from college, Kim attempted to deal with social issues in the most conventional way, through a self-defined realism. But over time, he changed his approach and began asking fundamental questions about existence. While there were various practical reasons for this transition, it was primarily motivated by his belief in self-cultivation as the highest purpose of existence. Indeed, all of Kim’s artistic activities can be seen as attempts at self-realization. Despite his critical views of reality, he did not follow the Minjung artists of the 1980s, who used art as a weapon for emancipation, social consciousness and societal transformation. Considering art as a branch of philosophy and allowing for phlegmatic introspection, Kim instead used his works to raise basic questions about humanity. This approach is embodied by his Gravity Nongravity series, which pursues social criticism through metaphor and metonymy, rather than direct messages.

Kim Young-Won then became fascinated with qigong meditation and Eastern philosophy, which he used to delve deeper into the fundamentals of human existence. The results were the unique human forms of the Shadow of Shadowseries, which represent the unity of yin and yang, mind and matter, form and emptiness, being and non-being. By actively integrating elements of qigong meditation and Taoism into his works, Kim distinguished himself from previous Korean artists who had embraced Eastern philosophy by emphasizing the performance of repetitive acts in their works. As manifestations of the invisible life force of qi, Kim’s sculptures may be read as keywords for fundamental themes of Zen and Taoism. Rather than encouraging passive appreciation, his works actively engage the audience by raising a stream of fundamental questions. 

Now in his mid-seventies, Kim Young-Won is younger than many of the other artists who have been selected for the Korean Artist Digital Archive project. With this in mind, we cannot predict what unexpected directions his works might take in the future. But as exemplified by nuanced perceptions of the human form and existentialism, his distinctive interpretations owe to his own internalization of Eastern philosophy and those representations deserve to be globally recognized and examined with the context of Korean social events and history. By organizing his works and other relevant materials, the Korean Artist Digital Archive project aims to stimulate domestic research and international promotion of this quintessential essential Korean artist.

1947: Born in Changwon, South Gyeongsang Province.

1968–1977: Undergraduate and graduate study in the Department of Sculpture at Hongik University.

1969–1981: Regularly participated in the annual National Art Exhibition of Korea, receiving various honorable mentions and special selections.

1981: Appointed as professor at Chungbuk National University. 

1989: Won the Sun Misul Award.

1994: Participated in the 22nd Bienal de São Paulo, where he was interviewed for Brazilian television. 

1995–2012: Taught as a Professor in the College of Fine Arts at Hongik University. 

1999: Produced the March 1^st Independence Movement Memorial.

2002: Won the Kim Se Choong Sculpture Award.

2005: Led the publication of Gyegan Jogak.

2009: Produced the statue of King Sejong in Gwanghwamun Square. 

2009: Won the Moonshin Art Award.

2010: Inaugurated as Dean of the College of Fine Arts at Hongik University.

2011: Publication of The Sculpture of Super-consciousness and Life: Kim Young Won (Changwon: Gyeongnam Art Museum).

2012: Publication of The Sculpture of Kim Young Won (Paju: Esoope) and Kim Young-Won: TEXT (Seoul: Hongik Museum of Art).

2013: Held Kim Young-Won e Novello Finotti: Scultori a confronto nella citta di Padua, a joint exhibition with Novello Finotti, in Padua, Italy.

2015:  Produced statues of ten Korean presidents now installed at Cheongnamdae. 

2016: Held the exhibition Kim Young-Won Sculpture: I-To Future at the Dongdaemun Design Plaza (DDP).