Since the 1970s, Kim Hong Joo, known as the “painter of flowers” and a “painter’s painter,” has created his own unique world of painting and expands, dramatically, the overall flow of Korean contemporary art. Born in 1945 in Boeun, North Chungcheong Province, he graduated from the Department of Western Painting at Hongik University in 1969, before returning for his Master’s degree from the same department in 1981. From 1981 to 2010, he taught as a professor in the Department of Art Education at Mokwon University, while continuously producing and showing his paintings in both group and solo exhibitions. He has received a number of prestigious honors and awards, including the Best Frontier Award at the 1978 Korean Art Awards; a Special Award at the Festival International de Peinture in Cagnes-sur-Mer, France in 1980; Problematic Artist of 1987 from Seoul Museum; the Director Prize from the Total Museum of Contemporary Art in 1991; the Lee In-seong Academy Award from Daegu Metropolitan City in 2005; the Paradise Art Award from the Paradise Cultural Foundation in 2006; and the Lee Jungseop Art Award from Chosun Ilbo newspaper in 2010. His works are in the collections of many major museums and galleries at home and abroad, including the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea; Seoul Museum of Art; Daejeon Museum of Art; Daegu Art Museum; Gyeonggi Museum of Art; Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art; and Fukuoka City Museum of Art.

Kim began his career by joining the influential art group Space and Time (ST) in 1973, with whom he primarily produced conceptual works involving objects, reflecting the experimental spirit of the time. But starting around 1975, Kim introduced his series of paintings combined with actual objects, a homage and reinterpretation of Robert Rauschenberg’s Combine paintings, with a unique Korean flair.  These multimedia paintings featured at his first solo exhibition in 1978 and began to be associated with the trend of hyperrealism in Korea. In the mid-1980s, Kim broke away from his object paintings in favor of unique landscapes with a careful arrangement of human figures and other visual elements. From the late 1980s to the late 1990s, he experimented with dense, layered images in which individual motifs—such as piles of soil or excrement, topographical lines, buildings, and text—accumulated to form a single unit that filled the pictorial plane. Also in the mid-1990s, he began to produce his signature flower paintings, in which he uses countless tiny brushstrokes to vividly depict a close-up view of flowers on huge canvases, with a distinct vivacity, a botanist’s appreciation, and a striking tactility. Since the 2000s, he has increasingly focused on his technique of painting with a fine brush intended for Eastern inkwash painting, which he uses to convey bodily sensations of touch. In particular, since the 2010s, he has sought to deliver the sensation of contact between the fine bristles of the brush and the individual threads of the canvas.

1945 / Born in Boeun, North Chungcheong Province.

1969 / Graduated from the Department of Western Painting at Hongik University.

1981 / Received graduate degree from the Department of Western Painting at Hongik University.

1981–2010 / Taught as a professor in the Department of Art Education of Mokwon University.

Major Solo Exhibitions

1978 / Seoul Gallery

1983 / Geurorichi Gallery and Cheongtap Gallery

1987 / Yun Gallery

1989, 1991, 1993, 1996 / Soo Gallery

1997 / Kumho Museum of Art

1999, 2002 / Kukje Gallery

2005 / Rodin Gallery

2006 / Daegu Culture and Arts Center

2009 / ARKO Art Center

2010 / Kukje Gallery, Chosun Ilbo Museum

2015 / Kukje Gallery

2016 / Gallery Doublet Plantation

2019 / Tokyo Gallery

Major Group Exhibitions

1973–1977 / ST exhibitions

1978 / Korean Art Awards exhibition (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, organized by Hankook Ilbo newspaper,)

1980 / Festival International de Peinture, Cagnes-sur-Mer, France (Cagnes-sur-Mer Museum in France)

1983 / Aspects of Korean Contemporary Art in the Late 1970s (Traveling exhibition in Japan, including Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum)

1984 / Korean Contemporary Art: Trends in the 1970s (Taipei Fine Arts Museum in Taiwan)

1985 / Asian Art (Fukuoka City Museum of Art in Japan)

1987 / Works of Problematic Artists of 1987 (Seoul Museum)

1991 / Korean Contemporary Art (Muzejsko-galerijski centar in Zagreb, Yugoslavia)

1993 / Across the Pacific Ocean (Queens Museum in New York & Kumho Museum of Art in Seoul)

1994 / Youn, Hyung Jae - Kim, Hong Joo (Joint exhibition at Galerie Bamberger, Mannheim, Germany)

1995 / Korean Art ‘95: Sense·of·Volume (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea)

1996 / From Korean Art in the 1990s: Life-sized Story (National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo & National Museum of Art, Osaka)

1996 / The Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (Queensland Art Gallery in Australia)

1997 / Ancient Traditions/New Forms: Contemporary Art from Korea (Joseloff Gallery at the University of Hartford, USA)

2001 / Era of Transformation and Dynamics (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea)

2001 / Truth and Illusion: The World of Hyperreal Painting (Ho-Am Art Museum)

2003 / Leaning Forward, Looking Back: Eight Contemporary Artists from Korea (Asian Art Museum in San Francisco)

2003 / Flowerpower (Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille in France)

2004 / Officina Asia (Galleria d’arte moderna di Bologna in Italy)

2007 / Korean Art: Discovery of Blank (Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art)

2008 / Natura (Joint exhibition with Jeong Gwangho at Gana Art Center)

2008 / Modernity and Beyond in Korean Art (Singapore Art Museum in Singapore)

2009 / Flowers Bloom on Every Border (Daejeon Museum of Art)

2010 / The Moon Is the Oldest Clock (National Gallery for Foreign Art in Bulgaria)

2011 / Tell Me Tell Me: Australian and Korean Art 1976–2011 (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea & Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney)

2012 / Here Is a Person (Daejeon Museum of Art)

2013 / Zeitgeist (Opening exhibition for Seoul branch of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea)

2016 / It Is in Nature (Museum SAN)

2018 / Fifth New Obscurity (Tsinghua University Art Museum in Beijing)

2019 / The Square: Art and Society in Korea 1900-2019 (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea)

2020 / Rabbit Direction Object (Art Plant Asia)

Awards

1978 / Best Frontier Award at the Korean Art Awards exhibition (Hankook Ilbo newspaper)

1980 / Special Award at the Festival International de Peinture, Cagnes-sur-Mer (Cagnes-sur-Mer Museum, France)

2005 / Lee In-seong Academy Award (Daegu Metropolitan City)

2006 / Paradise Art Award (Paradise Cultural Foundation)

2010 / Lee Jungseop Art Award (Chosun Ilbo newspaper)

Major Collections

National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea; Seoul Museum of Art; Daejeon Museum of Art; Daegu Art Museum; Gyeonggi Museum of Art; Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art; Fukuoka City Museum of Art, and more.

 The Painting and Anti-Painting of Kim Hong Joo:

Multi-layered Perspectives and Subversion of Images

                                                                  Chung Yeon Shim (Professor, Hongik University)

After generally following the overall trajectory of Korean art and its subsequent movements and trends in the early part of his career, Kim Hong Joo has taken his own path since the 1990s, diverging from mainstream practices and cultural logics. Instead, this shift can be partially attributed to larger changes in the Korean art world since the 1990s, especially the rise of postmodern thought and theory and the erosion of genre boundaries, replete with new interdisciplinary perspectives for making art that pervaded art schools’ pedagogies globally.  Within this changing environment, Kim Hong Joo has continually used his works to critique the flow of Korean modernist painting and the lingering presence of traditional and indigenous Korean perspectives. Early on, Kim was involved with the influential “Space and Time” (ST) group, bringing him to the forefront of Korean experimental art. But after indulging in some conceptual works that eschewed conventional art objects, he returned to painting, which he has focused on ever since.[1] While Kim did not pursue experimental works as fervently as some Korean artists (such as Lee Kun Yong), his critical approach to modernist painting became the foundation of his own artistic expression. Avoiding the grand narrative of Dansaekhwa (i.e., Korean monochrome) and the dominant style of the time, Kim pursued his own vision which was based on exploring the inherent essence of painting itself. Despite interrogating the materiality and ontology of painting as practice, his work showed some signs and references to each period of contemporary Korean art, indispensable influences which would creep into his métier and cultural outlook for the medium of painting. With this in mind, this article analyzes Kim’s work chronologically, outlining the defining characteristics and intersections with the contemporaneous contexts of Korean art.

In the 1970s and 1980s, criticism of Korean modernist painting was largely split between the Dansaekhwa movement and realist painting camps, the latter which was primarily represented by Minjung art (i.e., “People’s Art”). This sharp rift between two distinctive styles and theories is unique to Korean modern art, with no close equivalent in the West. But Kim Hong Joo has occupied his own unique territory between these two approaches, sharing certain affinities with both the mainstream (i.e., modernist art) and the peripherally political (Minjung realism). Whereas Western modernist art can be roughly traced along a single trajectory, from realism through reductionism to abstraction with an emphasis on flatness, Korean modernist art and Minjung art may be seen as coetaneous and conflicting, rather than successive stages of development. By revealing the cracks and layers of modernism, the paintings of Kim Hong Joo embody the anti-modernist perspective.

After his early experimental paintings based on diagonal lines and patterns, Kim began to focus on figurative paintings in the mid-1970s, coinciding with the emergence of hyperrealism, evoking Robert Bechtle and later Chuck Close and their photorealism (highly life-like portraiture on canvas) and sinhyeongsang (“new figurative art”) among young Korean artists. While Kim’s paintings from this time look quite realistic, they differ from the hyperrealist works of American artists like Bechtle and Close, which were strongly based on photography. By the mid-1970s, Kim had moved beyond conventional figurative images and self-portraits by incorporating everyday objects like doors and mirrors into his works. The minute brushstrokes in these works presage the extremely fine brushstrokes that would become a defining feature of his later paintings. These works from the 1970s are particularly important: they question the overall status of Korean postwar painting by ….. Since the 1980s, he has actively explored many different genres, styles, and motifs, including portraits, landscapes, text paintings, flower paintings, and “formless” flower paintings. However, all of his myriad works have ultimately addressed the same question: What is painting purpose? In particular, his paintings may be read as a symbolic language that preexists concrete objects, recalling Jacques Lacan’s theory of the “Symbolic,” which operates in the pre-linguistic realm of the imaginary unconscious. For example, defying fixation in terms of language, subject matter, or standard imagery, Kim’s recent “formless” flower paintings expose the flaws and fissures in our overall conception of images. With their thin, conspicuous surfaces formed by exceptionally delicate brushstrokes, Kim’s works seem to be the result of his own self-cultivation, rather than an attempt to immerse viewers in a world of decadent abundance.

This article examines Kim Hong Joo’s works chronologically, describing his defining characteristics and the artist’s changing approach to different periods in Korean modern history. Critical responses to his works are presented through catalogues and archive materials, along with interviews with critics, artists, and Kim Hong Joo himself. Unlike some contemporary artists, who oversee studios staffed by assistants, Kim personally makes each and every tiny brushstrokes in his works, a process-based obsessiveness unusual among his contemporaries. Charting the progression of these works overtime, various trends and changes begin to emerge. This article considers these unique details as evidence of the artist’s complex perspective on Korean modernist painting and the medium of painting as a whole.

I. Early 1970s: Experimental Art and the ST Group

Kim Hong Joo graduated from the Department of Painting at Hongik University in 1969.[2] At the time, third- and fourth-year art students were generally allowed to choose their own advisors and curriculum, with classwork that often consisted of simply gathering together in a classroom to freely paint and model for one another. Within this environment, Kim and his fellow students were drawn to emerging trends in abstract and experimental art generated abroad, imported and then transculturated in Korea for its own unique function and role in the country’s rapidly expanding culture industries.  This paradigm shift was exemplified by several groups of young artists who were beginning to turn their backs on the mainstream, desiring to challenge the status quo and vanguard about what art could be and these new practitioners populated the National Art Exhibition of Korea. These groups were led by the Young Artists Alliance, which held its first exhibition in December 1967. By that time, Kim was already quite familiar with the latest achievements in experimental art through the teachings, reading of translated materials, and activities of his professors, alumni network, and other students. One of his most influential professors in this regard was famed critic and theorist Yi Il, who introduced students to international trends (such as Neo-Dada) that he had recently learned about while studying in France. 

Inspired by such trends, various Korean art groups (like the Mu group and Sinjeon group) emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s, actively promoting experimental art and a break from conventional painting. One of the most notable groups of young experimental artists from this time was the Korean Avant-garde Association, better known as AG, which was established in 1969. Adopting Yi Il’s article “The Dynamics of Expansion and Reduction” as its manifesto, AG actively produced and promoted experimental art by Yi Il, Kim Inhwan, Oh Kwangsoo, Kim Ku-lim, Ha Jonghyeon, Choe Myeongyeong, Shim Munseop, and others.[3] AG held three exhibitions of members’ works, and also published four issues of its journal AG.

In December 1969, theorist Kim Bokyeong and artist Lee Kun Yong led the formation of the ST group at Dongyang Art Academy, near Ewha Womans University. After his graduation, Kim Hong Joo spent several years producing abstract monochrome paintings featuring repetitions of diagonal lines akin to artists working in similar ways abroad such as color field painter Mark Rothko. But when he heard that some of his colleagues had formed the ST group, he began participating in their seminars, where they discussed important articles like “Art After Philosophy” by conceptual artist and occasional critic Joseph Kosuth, “A Phenomenological Introduction to Encounter” by an influential artists and critic Lee Ufan, and various writings by Harold Rosenberg, the most prominent expert on modernist art.[4] After becoming an official member of ST in 1973, Kim spent the next two or three years engaging in media experiments and emergent trends related to “anti-object” works, “anti-paintings,” and conceptual art. Hence, like many young artists of this period, he engaged with various art groups and experimented with new ways to move beyond the flat canvas.

However, Kim’s artistic ideas and principles did not entirely coincide with those of ST. Seeking to break away from conventional art objects, ST’s group exhibitions heavily featured conceptual performances and events (e.g., Lee Kun Yong’s Body Drawing series and Event-Logical performances) that explored the relationship between language and body, drawing upon the philosophy of Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein. Feeling somewhat limited by this “anti-art” approach, however, Kim began showing sculptural installations such as Stone and Blue at the second ST exhibition (at Myeongdong Gallery in 1973) and Expansion at the third ST exhibition (at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in 1974). When seen head-on, confronting these installations they appear to look flat, like paintings, but they acquired the depth and dimension of relief sculptures when viewed from either side. 

Expansion (Figs. 1 and 2), which no longer exists, was named after Yi Il’s article “Expansion” from the catalog of the first AG exhibition. Recalling Daniel Buren’s Painting-Sculpture works of 1970, Expansion was a site-specific work that was repeatedly installed (and dismantled) at various exhibition sites, including the first and only Seoul Biennale (1974).[5] Viewed from photographs that document this site-specific installation, we see Expansion consists of fabric soaked with traditional black ink, juxtaposed with objects of various sizes. Crossing the boundary between painting and sculpture while generating a fluid relationship between the viewer and object, Expansion is now remembered as a landmark piece of conceptual art in Korea and it transformed the way the Korean public saw contemporary art. Unlike modernist paintings, which function outside of place as tableaux that can be freely moved and exhibited in a white cube space, Kim’s installations from this time cleverly arouse new thoughts about objects and where they might be installed and viewed.

As mentioned, the ST group focused primarily on conceptual works emphasizing performance and the body, which was seen as a mediator between the art objects and the surrounding space. Through their arbitrary and didactic aspects, exemplified by the works of Lee Kun Yong and Sung Neung-kyung, the “event-like” performance works of ST would challenge the standard relationship between the artist as Subject and the viewer as Object.

In this context, Kim presented an innovative performance that was advertised on posters as the First Solo Exhibition of Kim Hong Joo (Fig. 3).[6] Rather than a conventional place, the poster stated that the fictitious exhibition was begin held at “37º 35’ north latitude and 126º 55’ east longitude.” Notably, for the performance, Kim dressed up in a suit, as if he were actually holding a solo exhibition. Thus, this fake exhibition was itself a type of performance or event, reminiscent of contemporary works such as Yves Klein and others and that evince a pseudo-fictional reality. As a conceptual art event masquerading as a conventional art event, the work playfully combined elements of conceptual art and performance.

Around 1977, in an interview for Independent Exhibition Kim began to express his public reservations about conceptual art to the other members of ST. Recalling his thoughts at the time, he recently explained:

“I had a negative view of conceptual art’s tendency to reject art objects and play language games. Of course, conceptual art may have been important in the West, but it was difficult to realize in Korea, given the conditions of the 1970s. Also, it didn’t seem to have meaning in the Korean context . . . At that time, there were many negative views on contemporary art, with people saying ‘Contemporary art is over, let alone painting.’ Although they said that painting was over, I thought that the only thing I could do by myself was to paint, so that’s what I started doing.”[7]

Thus, Kim believed that ST’s subversion of objects, experimental performances, and conceptual events based on the body could not be properly expressed in the context of Korean contemporary art. Moreover, this comment suggests the artist’s inherent skepticism towards ST’s “anti-art” attitude and denial of art objects. Retrospectively, we can view this stance as transgressive and oppositional in opinion, reconfirming, enthusiastically and at the expense of other preoccupations for art’s function, Kim’s passion for the power of painting, which he felt had not been adequately explored in the postwar period by his contemporaries. He took this anti-modernist stance and launched his own critique of modernist painting. Notably, even as an artist who had studied painting at university, he did not participate in the events associated with the Dansaekhwa artists of the 1970s, such as Independent Exhibition or the École de Seoul exhibitions. Instead, he kept a certain distance from the Dansaekhwa movement in order to develop his own style and not be usurped by the cultural hegemony of this tendency for abstraction. In accordance with his disposition, he avoided overt criticism of painting in favor of more subtle assessments and appraisals using the medium itself. His break from modernist abstraction involved denying and deconstructing the traditional view of painting as “tableau.” Interestingly, this approach seems to show the influence of conceptualism, which Kim had expressly rejected.

II. Mid- to Late 1970s: Representational Painting and the “Parergon”

After his fake solo exhibition in 1975, this escapade for Kim allowed him to reconsider the relationship between painting and conceptualism. Although he did produce some abstract paintings which consisted of repetitious short brushstrokes, he ultimately decided against returning to abstract art. At the same time, he was not about to take up the conservative academic style favored by the National Art Exhibition of Korea.[8] Even so, he felt compelled to return to the planar surface of painting in order to resolve his aesthetic concerns with the experimental works of ST. Believing that the flat surface and encompassing frame of paintings are ontological constructs, he sought to transcend the conventional form of Western painting. Notably, this theoretical approach directly reflects his experience with conceptual art, demonstrating the fundamental importance of his early experimental phase in forming his critical perspective on painting. Describing this approach in an interview for this archive project, Kim said, “I just wanted to deviate from the basic elements of Western painting, which are the frame, screen, and pictorial plane [sic]. So I had this idea to connect images with real objects outside of the painting.”

Conventional paintings tend to conceal themselves as illusory representations of a certain scene or object. But by attaching actual frames of mirrors or windows to his pictorial surface, Kim openly subverted this supposed illusion, conducting a compelling experiment in “anti-painting.” In works such as Mirror Stand (Fig. 4), the image is juxtaposed with the actual object through the use of a mirror. By painting people or objects on canvas attached to window or mirror frames, he was able to juxtapose the dual gazes of representation and de-representation. Extending this coincidence of the real and fake, Kim would sometimes paint very realistic depictions of a fly, a stingray, or a human eye directly onto the panel of a door or the side mirror of a car (Figs. 5 and 6). Representative works include Tree-I (Fig. 7) and several untitled works, including Untitled (Fig. 8), which Kim showed in 1975 at the fifth ST exhibition. From this point, many of his works were “untitled,” and they began to show the characteristics of sinhyeongsang (new figurative art) or hyperrealism.[9] The realistic object works like Door (Fig. 9) exhibited in the Korean Art Awards exhibition in 1978 were shown in his first solo exhibition at Seoul Gallery in 1978.[10]

Some of Kim’s most significant works in this context are portraits of his family and of himself. For example, Untitled (Fig. 10) is a self-portrait painted in a round photographic frame, wherein the image appears three times, like a collage. Emphasizing the distortion and division of the gaze, this repetition prevents us from attaching a fixed meaning to the image, while also suggesting the notion of split identity. A similar approach can be seen in Untitled (Fig. 11), a self-portrait of the artist gazing off into the distance. Although portraits are usually intended to provide a realistic representation of a person, Kim often used frames to distort his depictions and defamiliarize the images. In Door, for instance, a window frame is used to divide the image of a person into segments.

Kim once claimed that he focused on these small object paintings simply because his studio at the time was quite small, but they can also be read as his response to the denial of objects promoted by ST.[11] Significantly, the object paintings also represent the first step in Kim’s process of questioning the essence of Korean painting by diverging from Western notions of contemporary art, an inquiry that led to his future explorations of concrete forms, abstraction, text paintings, and “formless” flower paintings. While these diverse works look very different on the surface, they are all part of his creative quest to subvert the ontology of modernist painting.

Starting in the mid-1970s, amidst the intense push for industrialization and urbanization, young Korean artists like Ko Younghoon and Kim Kangyong abandoned the abstract works of Dansaekhwa and returned to figurative paintings. These artists pioneered the emergence of a new style of realistic works known as sinhyeongsang, or “new figurative paintings,” which is sometimes associated with “Korean hyperrealism.”[12] Although some of Kim Hong Joo’s works from this period have been classified as Korean hyperrealism, they do not actually seek to replicate real forms or images based on photographs. On the contrary, using objects such as mirrors, frames, and doors, he sought to articulate the illusion inside and outside of the painting -- a mise-en-abyme effect -- thus exposing the limits of painting itself.[13]

In this way, Kim’s paintings from this period—including Untitled (Fig. 12) and numerous watercolors on paper—may be thought of as a parergon, Jacques Derrida’s term for supplementary material that exists apart from a main text, such as an appendix to a monographic book. Like a parergon that can only be grasped outside the primary frame, his “anti-paintings” accentuate the boundary between the inside and outside of a painting. Painted with a very fine brush, the images are sometimes distorted or compressed, like anamorphosis, yet this distortion actually reveals more about the subject than it conceals.[14]

III. 1980s to Mid-1990s: Experiments with a Fine Brush

In 1981, Kim became a professor at Mokwon University, enabling him to move out of his cramped studio into a much larger space where he could produce large-scale paintings for the first time in his career. With this change in environment and established tenure working in academia, he left behind his paintings with attached frames and began experimenting directly with the pictorial plane itself.[15] For example, Untitled (Fig. 13), which is now in the collection of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, offers a bird’s-eye view of a pastoral landscape, showing people lying or standing against a compartmentalized section of grass, surrounded by an empty void. Incredible for its microscopic detail, this huge painting was created with a very fine brush, a technique that has now become a trademark of his works. As opposed to Dansaekhwa artists like Ha Jonghyeon, who were using thick layers of paint applied to canvas to emphasize the materiality and texture of the surface itself, Kim applied his paint very delicately with a fine brush. His use of an overhead perspective also recalls the tradition of Eastern inkwash painting.

In this period, he no longer attached actual frames to the works, shifting the focus to his relatively grotesque depictions and deconstruction of various human figures. For example, Untitled (Fig. 14) seems to be an unusual self-portrait, in which the artist’s face is shown from a very low angle, as if it is floating. Moreover, only the head is visible, as if the artist has lost his body, generating an uncanny sensation. Although the face is familiar, the odd perspective and gaze create an anamorphic effect unlike anything seen previously from his oeuvre. Other grotesque and surrealist depictions of people from this time include Untitled (Fig. 15), which contains the text “1986X,” and Untitled (Fig. 16) which he showed at Across the Pacific Ocean at Queens Museum in New York in 1993. Adding to the surrealist and oneiric mood, Kim created a feeling of detachment in all three works by attaching ordinary objects, such as bandages and hats, to the canvas. These ordinary objects create distantiation with the viewer and return to notions that his work is evoking Rauschenberg’s Combine paintings, while also pushing Korean painting to new limits and trajectories, seldom seen before this period.  

As the size of his works grew, Kim switched from silk back to canvas, but he continued to paint with a fine brush, as before. The use of the fine brush on the rough texture of canvas yielded a number of interesting visual effects that he actively experimented with. Thus, from 1983 to 1987, he primarily focused on figurative paintings of grotesque human and other forms, painted with a fine brush and often combined with real objects.

The English word “grotesque” is derived from the Italian word grottesca, meaning “of a cave.” In the context of art, the term was first used in reference to an unusual motif of a human-plant hybrid, seen on Roman ruins excavated in the fifteenth century. According to Wolfgang Kayser, the “grotesque” in the arts raises hidden questions about life while releasing repressed desires.[16] Indeed, by arousing unexpected emotions and liberating images from the unconscious, the grotesque leads us away from reason and rationality into the world of the senses. Kim’s depictions of humans do not function as replications or traditional portraits. While he does refer to photographs, he often distorts one part or another, rather than attempting an entirely realistic copy of it. As explained by Richard Brilliant, most portraits rely on resemblance among the various forms of representation, serving as a type of name tag for the subject while generating mutual sympathy between the model and the image.[17] But Kim’s grotesque images of people are so absurdist, disingenuous, and distorted that they seem to question their very existence. In these images, the human body has merely lost its beauty and proportion, thus reviving the sense of vision and imagination that have often been omitted within the history of representation. In deviating from the order of the day (e.g. the predominance of ST, Minjung and Dansaekhwa before it), aesthetics (e.g. the binaries of abstraction and realism), standards (e.g. cultural expectation for art by the Korean government and public), and rules of conventional representation (e.g. the ontological nature of painting itself as seen from antiquity through to art history’s demands on it), his paintings subverted the fundamental image obtained from nature. Based on such characteristics, Kim’s works of the 1980s diverge just as much from the figurative works of Minjung art as they do from the performativity and materiality of Dansaekhwa.

Around 1985, Kim introduced another unique style of expression, using watercolors or oil paints to paint flowers or landscapes on large canvases divided into grids. Painted with an extremely fine brush, the forms of flowers and grass convey a dynamic vitality and a flailing, tactile sensation. In a 1987 landscape, Untitled (Fig. 17), he depicted the city of Daejeon from a bird’s-eye view, again recalling traditional Eastern inkwash paintings, but with the buildings and streets sharply segmented for a deconstructive effect. This effect is heightened by his use of an unprimed canvas, on which gesso was only applied to the area that would be painted, leaving the raw fabric exposed for a transparent and unrefined look. In landscape paintings such as Untitled (Fig. 18), winding roads, fields, grass, and the occasional house are represented with very fine lines, creating a distinct visual rhythm with the blank space. The prominent inclusion of blank space clearly sets these works apart from Western landscapes, in which every inch of the canvas must be filled. Also, the diverse visual elements coexist in an organic relationship that is unique within both Korean and Western art. Hence, Kim’s methodology focuses on image arrangement and deconstruction, rather than mere representation.

Over time, Kim begin adding text and images of soil, excrement, or modern houses to his landscape paintings, resulting in the works known as “layered landscapes” (1987–1996). These works can only be interpreted within the context of the widening urban landscape of Korea during the period of industrialization and the beginnings of what could be called suburban sprawl outside of Seoul and other smaller cities. Starting especially in the mid-1980s, many traditional houses in Korea were razed in order to build huge new apartment complexes in many different cities. By overlapping text with images of houses and soil in his layered landscapes Kim yielded a new visual perception that functions through the conflict between landscape paintings and works of text. Some of the textual elements are indecipherable, like hieroglyphics or the symbols on an ancient amulet. While such symbols may hold sacred meaning for a select few, they are purely visual to anyone without the proper knowledge to interpret them from a semiotician’s perspective. Acting as indeterminate signs floating on the surface, these unreadable figures are made up of units belonging to the “Imaginary,” sending us back to a primal state that preexists language, grammar, or social awareness.[18] Yet, even while floating in this void before the conception of language or image, the layered landscapes suggest an imaginary step toward becoming a form.

From a distance, these works—particularly those produced between 1994 and 1996—seem to be some type of landscape, but moving closer, the visual forms start to resemble types of calligraphy characters. At a very close distance and then carefully inspected, we can see that the “characters” are actually formed by piles of dirt or excrement. Just as microscopic and macroscopic views can reveal the respective gaps and boundaries in one another spatially and typographically speaking, if looking at a map or street grid, Kim’s layered landscapes create an interactive relationship with viewers, forcing them to physically move around the canvas. For example, his large acrylic painting Untitled (Fig. 19) resembles an upside-down face from afar, but a close examination reveals what appear to be piles of soil or excrement.[19] Interestingly, the upside-down face is a representational illusion formed by the confluence of the empty spaces, thereby combining the effects of engraving and embossing. Similarly, the text can appear as pure image, recalling Michel Foucault’s analysis of Magritte’s The Treachery of Images (“This Is Not a Pipe”).[20] 

One notable example of Kim’s intertextuality can be found in a landscape that he painted in 1997, Untitled (Fig. 20). Rather than simply relying on the interdependence of words and images, he instead used a fine brush to write transposed text that is very difficult to read at first glance. Only by carefully reading from left to right can viewers identify the text as the poem “Rotation of the Earth 1” by Kang Eungyo:

Rotation of the earth,

The day is getting dark.

An empty yard falls in the distance.

Layers of wind in infinite sky

People fluttering alone

Houses on a wavy street

One ray of sunlight remains until the end,

Taking the city wherever it goes.

The day is getting dark.

Every day in our country,

Beautiful women fall down and pile up.

Walking fast, even in their sleep,

Scattered out of bed.

Sand is endless

Toward the dark centuries,

Life and death peeling off, layer by layer.

No one

Can hide their flesh.

The houses weep.

The day is getting dark.

Stuck in the wind.

The layered landscapes of houses, cities, and fields in Kim’s paintings seem to visualize the temporality of the “dark centuries, life and death peeling off layer by layer.” Significantly, he personally painted every detail of these works with a fine brush, with no assistance. Through this arduous process, the individual letters and images accumulate one by one, embodying the performance and labor of the artist. Hence, the works may be thought of as “landscapes of images,” enacting a world of synesthesia where the senses of sight, hearing, and touch are integrated. Rather than traditional landscapes, they are “imagescapes” that interpret shapes and forms within another dimension.[21] In particular, the layered landscapes produced in 1993 represent a unique world characterized by the coexistence of different units and perspectives (Figs. 21 and 22). At first glance, these large works seem to be ordinary landscape paintings, with an orderly arrangement of houses, roads, and fields. But when viewed from above, below, or the sides, the scenes are composed of piles of soil and unreadable texts that take on surprising new dimensions and interpretative meaning, thus dividing our vision and engaging the mind through a continuous oscillation between psychological intervention and separation. This division of vision and the alternating appearance and disappearance of images, which critic Kim Won Bang called a type of “amnesia,” force us to summon new senses for viewing and understanding the works.[22]

IV. 1996 to Present: From Tactile to Fragmented and “Formless” Flower Paintings

The next evolution of Kim’s paintings takes us to botany and flowers in particular. Some of Kim’s most popular works were his large flower paintings, which he introduced at his 1996 solo exhibition featuring four paintings of lotus flowers at Soo Gallery. Unbeknown to the public, he had been painting flowers with a fine brush as early as the mid-1980s (including many watercolor works), although they were not presented as part of a series. The delicate shapes of the flowers are composed of countless tiny lines, creating an illusion of tactility and movement, as if the petals are gently blowing in the breeze. Some of the flower paintings include paint drips and pictorial brushstrokes. Overall, they reveal gaps in our perception of pictorial images, and thus may be read as a subversion of images (Figs. 23 and 24).

Kim’s flower paintings have undergone two major changes since he introduced them. In the works from 1996 to 2002, the flowers are placed in the center of the pictorial plane, rendered with bright colors and subtle brushstrokes, with no hint of the grotesque sensation or deformation of human form like his earlier works. The four aforementioned works presented at Soo Gallery respectively show lotus flowers from the front, from the side, with the buds closed, and turned upside down (Figs. 25, 26, 27, and 28). Unlike the layered landscapes, where multiple images were overlapped or arranged side-by-side, these four flowers were each painted as separate works and arranged seemingly at random. Interestingly, Kim did not paint these works from actual flowers, but rather from lotus flower decorations used to celebrate Buddha’s birthday. But by painting them in such meticulous detail with a fine brush, he creates for viewers the optical illusion of actual lotus flowers. This gap between real objects and painted images reflects the artist’s ongoing experiments with painting and “anti-painting,” which he has explored throughout his career. Once again, the senses of sight and touch are merged, as the minute lines forming the flowers transcend vision by generating tactile sensations. As he once said, “People tend to communicate only through language. But I’m trying to suggest a type of communication that occurs through the senses.”[23]

The flower paintings underwent their first major change in 2002, in conjunction with the artist’s deteriorating health. From 2002 to 2010, although he continued his signature method of painting with a fine brush, the flower paintings became relatively looser, less cohesive, and more fragmented. The overall shape of the flowers started to collapse, while the border between the center and the periphery, which is clearly seen in the earlier works, disintegrated. These changes can be seen in the works shown at Kim’s 2005 solo exhibition at Rodin Gallery (Fig. 29).

Since 2010, his flower images have become even more formless, diverging further from the real shapes of nature. In these “formless” flower paintings, blank space is strongly emphasized, while the fibers of the canvas fabric are evenly filled with translucent, monotone colors. As such, rather than a mere support material for a visual image, the canvas becomes a dynamic tactile space where the artist’s body and fine brush engage with the pictorial plane (Fig. 30).

In Kim’s paintings, the flowers are more than just flowers; they are images embodying the artist’s abstract thoughts and ideas. Through repetition, the flowers lose their function of directly representation, even when painted in a hyperrealist style. Rendered with no distinct shading or source of light, the flowers become repetitive traces and shapes containing the physicality and performativity of the artist. The endless flow of paints in formless lines taking the shape of flowers interferes with our conventional interpretation of the image as a recognizable element of nature, yielding something more ambiguous. In this way, Kim’s works recall Georges Bataille’s theory of “formlessness,” described in his Critical Dictionary.[24] Looking at a painting by Manet, Bataille was unable to stand on either side of the artist’s subject matter or style, until he eventually grasped the slippage between the two axes as the working mechanism of the painting. Likewise, Kim’s flower paintings can be discerned as beautiful shapes composed with a fine brush, but it is the ongoing fluctuation between the subject matter and style that forms their fundamental mechanism for our interpretation of such painterly work. In other words, Kim is not interested in symbolic images or stylistic details (such as hyperrealism), but rather in the continuous slippage between these two axes of visual representation.

In some of his earliest paintings, before he was involved with conceptual art and experimental art, Kim Hong Joo used a fine brush to paint countless layers of diagonal lines with simple brushstrokes. Over time, he became the “enemy of painting” (in Kim Won Bang’s words), switching to pictorial “anti-paintings” pictorial that deconstruct our conception of images. This trajectory somewhat recalls the path of Joan Miró, who in 1927 declared that he wanted to “assassinate painting.” For the next ten years or so (which are unique in his career), Miró produced works that can be called “anti-paintings,” often attaching non-traditional objects to the canvas.[25] But during his own years of deconstruction and subversion, Kim has never engaged in angry or aggressive criticism. Indeed, his journey has basically been a battle within himself, as he continually strives to paint “anti-paintings.” Through his grotesque figures, distorted images, and visual puzzles, he actively undermines our conventional notions of painting. Since 1970, the field of Korean painting has progressed from experimental art to modernism and postmodernism, highlighted by the Dansaekhwa and Minjung movements, along with many smaller group activities. Throughout this forty-plus year period, however, Kim has not been associated with any particular modernist group – an outlier, provocateur, and dabbler in ideas and aesthetic trends -- yet an artist with profound importance for Korean art history through his thinking about painting and representation between realism and abstraction. Instead, he is one of the few artists whose oeuvre is imbued with many layers of Korean contemporary art. Created in the midst of Korea’s tumultuous modernization, Kim’s landscapes are reflections of Kang Eungyo’s poem: “Layers of wind in infinite sky/People fluttering alone/Houses on a wavy street/One ray of sunlight remains until the end/Taking the city wherever it goes.” His landscapes embody the city, the wind, and the street.

1945 / Born in Boeun, North Chungcheong Province.

1969 / Graduated from the Department of Western Painting at Hongik University.

1981 / Received graduate degree from the Department of Western Painting at Hongik University.

1981–2010 / Taught as a professor in the Department of Art Education of Mokwon University.

Major Solo Exhibitions

1978 / Seoul Gallery

1983 / Geurorichi Gallery and Cheongtap Gallery

1987 / Yun Gallery

1989, 1991, 1993, 1996 / Soo Gallery

1997 / Kumho Museum of Art

1999, 2002 / Kukje Gallery

2005 / Rodin Gallery

2006 / Daegu Culture and Arts Center

2009 / ARKO Art Center

2010 / Kukje Gallery, Chosun Ilbo Museum

2015 / Kukje Gallery

2016 / Gallery Doublet Plantation

2019 / Tokyo Gallery

Major Group Exhibitions

1973–1977 / ST exhibitions

1978 / Korean Art Awards exhibition (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, organized by Hankook Ilbo newspaper,)

1980 / Festival International de Peinture, Cagnes-sur-Mer, France (Cagnes-sur-Mer Museum in France)

1983 / Aspects of Korean Contemporary Art in the Late 1970s (Traveling exhibition in Japan, including Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum)

1984 / Korean Contemporary Art: Trends in the 1970s (Taipei Fine Arts Museum in Taiwan)

1985 / Asian Art (Fukuoka City Museum of Art in Japan)

1987 / Works of Problematic Artists of 1987 (Seoul Museum)

1991 / Korean Contemporary Art (Muzejsko-galerijski centar in Zagreb, Yugoslavia)

1993 / Across the Pacific Ocean (Queens Museum in New York & Kumho Museum of Art in Seoul)

1994 / Youn, Hyung Jae - Kim, Hong Joo (Joint exhibition at Galerie Bamberger, Mannheim, Germany)

1995 / Korean Art ‘95: Sense·of·Volume (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea)

1996 / From Korean Art in the 1990s: Life-sized Story (National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo & National Museum of Art, Osaka)

1996 / The Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (Queensland Art Gallery in Australia)

1997 / Ancient Traditions/New Forms: Contemporary Art from Korea (Joseloff Gallery at the University of Hartford, USA)

2001 / Era of Transformation and Dynamics (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea)

2001 / Truth and Illusion: The World of Hyperreal Painting (Ho-Am Art Museum)

2003 / Leaning Forward, Looking Back: Eight Contemporary Artists from Korea (Asian Art Museum in San Francisco)

2003 / Flowerpower (Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille in France)

2004 / Officina Asia (Galleria d’arte moderna di Bologna in Italy)

2007 / Korean Art: Discovery of Blank (Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art)

2008 / Natura (Joint exhibition with Jeong Gwangho at Gana Art Center)

2008 / Modernity and Beyond in Korean Art (Singapore Art Museum in Singapore)

2009 / Flowers Bloom on Every Border (Daejeon Museum of Art)

2010 / The Moon Is the Oldest Clock (National Gallery for Foreign Art in Bulgaria)

2011 / Tell Me Tell Me: Australian and Korean Art 1976–2011 (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea & Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney)

2012 / Here Is a Person (Daejeon Museum of Art)

2013 / Zeitgeist (Opening exhibition for Seoul branch of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea)

2016 / It Is in Nature (Museum SAN)

2018 / Fifth New Obscurity (Tsinghua University Art Museum in Beijing)

2019 / The Square: Art and Society in Korea 1900-2019 (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea)

2020 / Rabbit Direction Object (Art Plant Asia)

Awards

1978 / Best Frontier Award at the Korean Art Awards exhibition (Hankook Ilbo newspaper)

1980 / Special Award at the Festival International de Peinture, Cagnes-sur-Mer (Cagnes-sur-Mer Museum, France)

2005 / Lee In-seong Academy Award (Daegu Metropolitan City)

2006 / Paradise Art Award (Paradise Cultural Foundation)

2010 / Lee Jungseop Art Award (Chosun Ilbo newspaper)

Major Collections

National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea; Seoul Museum of Art; Daejeon Museum of Art; Daegu Art Museum; Gyeonggi Museum of Art; Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art; Fukuoka City Museum of Art, and more.