Introducing Kim Tschang-Yeul

Kim, born in Maengsan-gun, Pyeongannam-do Province, in 1929, has built a unique portfolio inspired by waterdrops. He studied painting at Seoul National University College of Fine Arts and completed his degree in 1948. After the Korean War, he founded the Contemporary Artists Association and led the Art Informel movement with fellow artists between 1956 and 1961. In 1961, he diverted his attention overseas after submitting his work to the 2nd Paris Biennale. He moved to New York City in the mid-1960s and studied printmaking at the Art Students League of New York. While in New York, he worked as a spray painter to make a living, embossing patterns on neckties. He found influence and then implemented an idea from this process and formation of clotted waterdrops—encompassing unique shapes and reflective patterns—while using the spray-on technique. In 1969, Kim participated in the Avant-Garde Festival in Paris with the help and collegiality of Nam June Paik. Kim took this opportunity and moved to Paris, where he began envisioning the world of waterdrops in earnest. The result was the Event of Night he submitted to Salon de Mai in 1972. The following year, he held his first solo exhibition at Knoll International and unveiled unprecedented paintings inspired by water droplets. An art critic, Alain Bosquet, singled out his process, saying the “waterdrops are driven by some sort of self-transformation, and they have a power of hypnosis rarely found in paintings” in his review of Kim Tschang-Yeul’s droplets. In the following years, Kim held over 80 solo exhibitions as of 2016, not just in Korea but in every part of the world, including the important art centers in the United States, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and Japan. Of those exhibitions, the ones held at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in 1993, the Jeu de Paume Paris in 2004, the National Museum of China in 2005, and the Busan Museum of Art in 2009 gained the widest recognition by critics, collectors and art historians. He explored a broad spectrum of media, painting not only on canvas but on used newspapers, Korean paper, wood, sand, and water droplets as objets d’art to create diverse compositions and reveal the multifaceted aspects of water’s fluidity. Starting at the end of the 1980s, he introduced traditional Korean paper on canvas, leading to the development of the “Recurrence” and the “Memorial Service” series, which evoke oriental styled nostalgia and interpreted such identity as a vital vector of Eastern art.

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Interpretation and Reception of the Paintings of Kim Tschang-yeul 
as Seen through Newspaper Articles from 1955 to 2016

 

Kim Jungwha

 

□ Contents  Introduction 1. Process for the Collection of Newspaper Articles  2. Comprehensive Summary of Newspaper Articles 3. Kim Tschang-yeul’s Early Phase: 1955-1972 4. Progeny of the Water Drops paintings: 1973-1979 5. Growth of the Proper Noun, Hydro-aesthetics and the “Artist of Water Drops”: 1980-1999 6. Definitions of a “Water Drops” aesthetics and the Birth of a Myth: 2000-2016  Conclusion

 

Introduction

 

The purpose of this essay is to form a comprehensive understanding of the creative media produced by Kim Tschang-yeul—particularly his paintings—artwork which represents an important fold in the history of Korean art and world art more generally, ingenuity derived from his extensive time spent both at home and in Europe and the United States. For the past sixty years, Kim has merited considerable attention and acclaim for what may be termed a hydro-aesthetics: a water droplet technique evolved out of street art to become a refined painterly technique.  Through an analysis of articles about the artist and his art published in daily newspapers from 1955 to 2016, which were collected as part of the project to construct the Kim Tschang-yeul Digital Archives, ... The research began in 2017 as part of the plan by the Korea Arts Management Service to set up the Senior Artist Digital Archiving Project. The digital archiving project aimed to collect all of the materials, textual and visual materials related to the artist’s life, works, and exhibitions and to build up a comprehensive information system which can be exploited extensively for, among other things, digital publication in a variety of formats including e-book. 

 

Kim Tschang-yeul, born in 1929, has been active in the art world for over sixty years. As a preliminary stage for the comprehensive documentation of his entire career, we gathered, near exhaustively, all of his exhibition portfolios available today and catalogue them to establish the chronology of his life’s work. I In an effort to create an accurate data collection on which future in-depth studies can rely,

 

a brief chronology of the paintings by Kim Tschang-yeul is based on the collected materials which are as follows: 

Number of paintings by decade	Paintings in total:                     1,149
	1950s and 1960s	45
	1970s	200
	1980s	252
	1990s	377
	2000s	227
	2010s	48
Exhibitions	Solo exhibitions: 96	Group exhibitions: 176
Exhibition catalogues	Catalogues: 83
	Other materials: 414 (Brochures, leaflets, photographs, invitation cards, etc.)
Written materials	16 (except for exhibition catalogues)  2,492 articles (newspapers and magazines)
Artist’s personal materials	75 (photographs, letters, etc.)

 

One of the first research activities to archive the prolific output by Kim Tschang-yeul, is  not to create an impeccable collection of all of the paintings produced by the artist. Rather, my goal is to provide researchers with detailed information on his paintings and the events connected with his activities as an artist so that they can conduct more extensive in-depth studies.

 

This study is, asmentioned earlier, focused on newspaper articles written about the paintings of Kim Tschang-yeul to discuss how the paintings have been interpreted, transmitted, and received by the ordinary art-loving public over the past sixty years.

One may readily agree that it is through daily newspapers that a majority of ordinary art lovers in Korea are given access to the news of the art world. In Korea, the articles on art printed in daily newspapers have been written largely by reporters rather than critics, artists, or other art specialists. Unfortunately, many of these newspaper reporters lacked a university degree and often had no expertise or knowledge of art, and would normally take on new topics to cover and meet a deadline, leaving precious little time to formulate sufficient background context for art movements, practitioners or how artwork was imperatively important to Korea and the outside world. This explains why a great majority of the articles on art in Korean newspapers tended to heavily rely on press releases provided by the art galleries or event organizers concerned, recapitulating the synopsis provided by the institutions themselves. That is also why their articles were not generally regarded seriously by readers. The lukewarm reception by the public and a lack of in-depth art journalism, however, could not keep the newspapers and their reporters from writing about the artist Kim Tschang-yeul and his art over a period a more than half a century. While these articles may not be written by art experts, they nevertheless contain a wealth of information about the artist’s points of view regarding his art, which continued to develop with the significant changes made with the passage of time.  We could then infer that articles are a great source of local history and mediocre connoisseurship about how the paintings by Kim Tschang-yeul were interpreted, transmitted, and received by the general art-loving public for all these years.

 

1. Process for the Collection of Articles from Periodicals

 

The periodical articles on the paintings by Kim Tschang-yeul collected by the Kim Tschang-yeul Digital Archives Construction Team can be summarized as follows:

 

Statistics of the periodical articles on the art of Kim Tschang-yeul (* Result of 2017 survey by the research team) 

Daily newspapers (Korean)	2,414
Magazines (Korean)	27
Art periodicals (Korean)	33 (art magazines)

 

The work of collecting newspaper articles on the art of Kim Tschang-yeul from the 1950s began with searching through online newspaper archives. For Korean newspapers, we used two different spellings of the artist’s name in the Korean alphabet, 김창열 and 김창렬, as well as his name as written in Chinese characters, 金昌烈, while for the English articles using three different variations, Tschang-yeul Kim, Tschang Yeul Kim, and Tschangyeul Kim, as well as Kim Tschang-yeul. The Dong-A Ilbo and Chosun Ilbo were the first two Korean daily newspapers that we searched, mostly because they were two of the most influential Korean daily newspapers that have offered online archives of their past articles. The articles retrieved from the archives were converted to pdf files. In the following stage, we used the online article retrieval service at the website to search for articles in other Korean daily newspapers including the Kyunghyang Shinmun, Kukmin Ilbo, Naeil Shinmun, Munhwa Ilbo, Seoul Shinmun, Segye Ilbo, The Hankyoreh, and Hankook Ilbo. As the service provided only articles produced after 1990, we had to use the Naver News Library to search for the articles published in previous years in the Kyunghyang Shinmun, Maeil Business Newspaper, and The Hankyoreh. One cumbersome issue was that we needed to scan the text images into jpg files because the original newspaper articles provided by the portal were in image format, explaining why many of these retrieved texts are hard to read due to the low resolution of the images themselves. One helpful tip that we can give to the future researcher with regard to our experience may be that they can refer to the Naver service to read the original texts if they found that the articles that we collected were not optically decipherable. After the collection of newspaper articles, we visited the National Library of Korea to search through microfilms of old magazine articles related to the paintings of Kim Tschang-yeul. These articles, in microfilm form, when retrieved from the library, were printed and scanned to pdf files.

In addition to the periodical articles collected online and via the national library, we were also granted access to the scrapbooks made and stored by the artist’s family, which we believe are as invaluable as the collection of articles we collected and analyzed. The scrapbooks contained press clippings of the early activities of Kim Tschang-yeul as an artist, many of which coincided with the materials that we had collected earlier online, helping us to replace the low-resolution images with much more sharply defined versions that were cut from their original newspapers and held up better to paper’s natural aging process. The scrapbooks also included quite a few clippings from periodicals that are otherwise inaccessible through online databases, although some of these scraps had no specific name with the periodicals from which they were cut nor the dates of publication. As for the articles from the Korean art magazines, the ARKO archives provided a fine source of information. The archives, however, provided no lists or indexes of the articles printed in the art magazines, particularly Korea’s most prominent art magazine Wolgan Misool (Monthly Art), so we were forced to spend a lot of time and energy browsing through all of the art magazines introduced in the archives. The articles collected through this process were scanned and converted into pdf files, while the materials collected were savedusing screenshots and converting into jpg files. The collected articles were then given reference numbers set according to their publication dates and arranged into an excel file.   

 

2. Comprehensive Summary of Newspaper Articles

 

The first newspaper article that contained the name of Kim Tschang-yeul is a published story that listed prize winners in the National Art Exhibition of Korea held in 1955. His name was found in the list of the winners in the Western Painting category. We found that his name had since appeared in newspaper articles every year untilthis research was completed in 2017, the only years which exclude mention of Kim or his artwork are 1967, 1968, and 1970, during which times he had been staying in the United States and France.

 

Year	Number of Articles

Total number of articles perused: 2,414 (as of August 2017 when the collection of articles was concluded.) 

 

The task of analyzing the collected newspaper articles required our research team to read the entire collection of articles. Reading more than 2,400 articles was a massive undertaking, a herculean task that required much time, energy, and intellectual toil. It was, in fact, a process demanding as much effort and attention as that of searching for the newspaper articles themselves.  Our systematic effort to add keyword tags to each article will allow for search prompts by concept and offer options for locating specific content in a given article or set of articles, thus it will be of great archival assistance to all those using this digital database.

 

The newspaper articles on Kim Tschang-yeul that we collected can be classified by contents as follows:

○ Articles written by the artist himself

○ Introduction/criticism of the works and solo exhibitions of the artist (including interviews with the artist)

○ Articles on group exhibitions (including international exhibitions, art fairs, and biennales) 

○ Articles on the artist’s biographic facts (including interviews with the artist)

○ Articles on the latest trends in the art world related to the artist (including interviews) 

○ Articles on other artists who were associated with Kim Tschang-yeul 

○ Articles on the art market (including sales and auctions of art works) 

 

The articles from newspapers of the early 1950s were collected largely by the method of saving a screenshot or by retrieval from microfilm databases in Seoul. A majority of the materials obtained through the process were found to be difficult to read or see/discern photographic images due to low resolution of the newspapers themselves as interface image. Despite the difficulty in deciphering typeface and photographs of exhibitions and art itself, we found some interesting facts about the young artist Kim Tschang-yeul from newspapers articles published between the 1950s and 1960s. The articles informed us of a wide range of activities where he had engaged himself as a young emerging artist. As a founding member of the Contemporary Artists Association (Hyeondae Misulga Hyeophoe), he wrote articles supporting the avant-garde efforts to encourage the existing art world to embrace things that were new and innovative, participated in artist and university talks to discuss the role of art, and gave interviews about his own art. We found the news of his first solo exhibition and related critical comments in ten newspaper articles published in 1963. These were then followed by 29 articles in 1976, 16 in 1979, and 16 in 1983, showing, quite naturally, that more articles were produced during the years when his solo exhibitions took place in Korea; this also corresponds to very few Korean journalists having foreign correspondence work outside of Korea during the Park and Chun regimes. After the democratic transition, a particularly large number of news articles were published about Kim, 60 in total, of newspaper articles were produced in 1993, largely because of his solo exhibition held at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Gwacheon which received wide media coverage. The extensive coverage of his activities in that year and the following years is also related to the launch of various art events such as art fairs and biennales, as well as the expansion of art pages in the daily newspapers. The trend was also connected with the creation of the art auction companies and a booming art market which helped to attract the attention of the public with the prices of artworks, which, in turn, led newspaper companies to use more space for art. It was during this period that his name frequently appeared in the art sections of daily newspapers covering various art events, including exhibitions, with such expressions as “famous for water drops” and “well known to us for his paintings of water drops.” It was since then that Kim Tschang-yeul had become the “artist of water drops.”

It was in 2002 that Kim Tschang-yeul appeared most frequently in daily newspapers in Korea, and since then was mentioned in around 100 newspaper articles nearly every year since. It was also in the new millennium period that Kim Tschang-yeul had a solo exhibition at the Gallery Hyundai and that he was invited to hold a retrospective exhibition two years later at the prestigious Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris, becoming the second Korean artist to have his works exhibited by the institution. It is interesting to note that when the exhibition actually took place in 2004, there were only two newspapers that reported the event; again, a reporting deficiency inherent to Korean national news networks having too few foreign correspondents and journalists working abroad in Europe to cover and gather non-breaking news stories, usually dependent on the associated presses like Agence France-Presse, Reuters and AP.

 

Our collection of newspaper articles shows that the paintings of Kim Tschang-yeul and his exhibitions continued to be covered by the Korean press once every two or three years since his paintings of water droplets was first introduced to the art connoisseurs in Paris, and his first solo exhibition in Korea took place three years later. The outstanding success of his water drop series of paintings in Western countries mesmerized the Korean press, making them heap praise and give attention through new reporting about his art. The initial sensation that spread among art reporters in Korea gradually developed into questions such as what his water drops meant to him, why the artist should remain attached to a single subject matter and visual motif for several decades, and what changes there have been in the painting style and philosophy behind the continued evolution water drops. Since the first question raised in a newspaper article written in 1973, such questions continued to be asked until his solo exhibition in 2016, during which the symbolic meaning of his water drops continued to evolve until it reached a kind of cosmic significance in Korea.

 

3. Kim Tschang-yeul in the Early Phase: 1955-1972

 

The first recorded newspaper article to appear with the name of Kim Tschang-yeul was in …... His name appeared a second time in 1957, when he participated in the first exhibition organized and held by the Contemporary Artists Association the same year in …. In an article, “Power to Get over the Beauty: A Review of the Contemporary Artists Association Exhibition,” written by Lee Kyung-sung for Chosun Ilbo and dated May 11, the author wrote that he could “hear the clarity of metallic nature from Kim Tschang-yeul’s Sunflower. Unfortunately, however, no one knows where that painting is today.

Kim Tschang-yeul, in this early phase of his career as an artist, contributed essays to newspapers to express his ideas about new art.

In a poem, “Secret Talk,” that he wrote as a member of the Contemporary Artists Association for the column Images of Spring(Bomui Hwasang) of Hankook Ilbo dated January 11, 1958, Kim lamented vehemently: “Beat me with a mallet and break me into pieces, / Or stand upright like a rock even for a moment. / I’ll then throw myself down and break my body which is frozen like ice.” 

Kim Tschang-yeul also wrote an essay titled “An Excuse of Dishwater” in the column Images of Early Spring (Sinchun Hwasang) of Hankook Ilbo dated on January 24, 1960, saying that he had in the depth of his heart a strong feeling of antipathy which was as slimy as ‘mucus’ although he was treated like ‘plain water’ by others: “It seems that my acquaintances tend to say that I am a very good man. That is to say, they seem to think that I have no spirit of artisanship, and that I am like plain dishwater. […] I spent my childhood days at a riverside village and had a lot of water splashing [sic] fights in the river whenever summer came. I felt like choking and my eyes soring when water jets hit my face during the fight. I will win, I thought, if I can get through this crucial moment. Not for fame, not for anything, only for resistance. It was fun for fun’s sake. I was then called a ‘malignant fiend’. What is this about ‘plain dishwater’ or ‘malignant fiend’? The problem is whether or not this slimy mucus remaining in me would lead my energy to the direction of clear and wise efforts. My paintings and my life should be more strengthened here and now [sic].”

This image of ‘mucus’ appeared again in “The Year 1962, an Abstract Artist Saw,” contributed to Daehan Ilbo and dated January 1, 1962: “Some sticky stuff comes in from all directions and wraps my body, layer by layer. I cannot see this stuff clearly, nor can I move my body as I intend. I try to gather all the strength left in me to start a revolution, but my ideas and my plans soon harden into meaningless actions. There sometimes does occur an abrupt change, which is like magic performed by a magician. It makes me feel as if I have been freed completely from this stuff sticking to me so tenaciously. It is the same orgasmic sensation you feel when ejaculation is coming on. I don’t know exactly under what condition such phenomenon takes place, though it is clear that it comes when I keep my body busily moving. In 1962, I will make my whole body busy like an athlete.” While it is not clear what he wanted to say in this essay, the comparison with mucus of his state of mind yearning for what was new, such as a revolution, is quite interesting. Significantly, it was just after this period that Kim Tschang-yeul began to paint hard spherical objects melting down into slimy substances in the early phase of his journey as an artist to find his own subject matter which, would eventually be water drops.

 

As an ambitious young artist, Kim Tschang-yeul also actively engaged himself in various activities representing the new aesthetic movement sought by the Contemporary Artists Association. In 1960, he wrote “The Thirty Tasks to Fulfill at the Current Stage” to a newspaper in 1960 to demand the establishment of a public organization that could provide transparent, fair administration for the art community, and not continue to rely on cronyism, censorship, and the politicization of artists and their work. In “The Attitude of Modern Art for Progress – Conversation for the Purification of Korean Modern Art” hosted by the Chosun Ilbo on March 26, 1961, he expressed his ideas of modern art supported by the young generation of Korean artists against Kim Byung-ki, who, then in his forties, represented the older generation. He had another opportunity to talk about his ideas on modern art when the Chosun Ilbohosted a talk, “Modern Art in Quest of a Great Leap in Quality: A Roundtable Talk for the Settlement of the 5^th Contemporary Artists Association Exhibition,” by the end of the same year. He joined Kim Chung-up, Bang Keun-taek, Kim Young-joo and Kim Byung-ki in this panel discussion and expressed his views on modern art, largely advocating its experimental, avant-garde aspects. In “Sinjangno” (“New Road”), a serial interview covered by Daehan Ilbo dated June 29, 1962, he answered the question on cultural policy by saying, “Well, I don’t know. But isn’t the thing called ‘art policy’ just an accessory the government wears for fashion though it has no need for it? If a government policy is to coordinate the welfare of people with that of the state, shouldn’t we have already had an art gallery or two for modern art?” The interviewer briefly wrote about Kim Tschang-yeul in the postscript of the interview: “This man with a small physique was never upset, even when he gave sharp criticism. There I saw a young, thirty-four-year-old painter fighting fiercely at the battlefront for Korean modern art against prejudice and misunderstanding.”

The earliest newspaper articles about Kim Tschang-yeul are largely connected with the annual Contemporary Artists Association Exhibitions started in 1957, a joint exhibition between the Contemporary Artists Association and the 1960 Fine Artist Association, the Invitational Exhibition for the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the Actuel Exhibition, and his participation in the international events such as the São Paulo International Art Festival and the Paris Biennale.

  

The article in the Chosun Ilbo dated September 10, 1963, contains information on the first solo exhibition of Kim Tschang-yeul: “A total of 42 works are displayed, including the work titled “NO.1-1963.” All are abstract paintings with titles not taken from any name of nature or proper noun, defying the convention as avant-garde painters usually do, instead using Roman letters with numbers representing the production year, thus differently attracting the viewers’ attention.” As for the review of the exhibition covered in the Kyunghyang Shinmun dated September 12, he was rather severely criticized that “he held a comfortable solo exhibition with works raising no questions.” The reviewer asserted: “[His paintings feature] A large empty space crossing the middle part of the canvass like waves continuing to expand as they run, while making no changes on the upper and lower areas. The paintings have already been settled with non-adventure and traces of the artist’s elaborations. Some of these are very good. The band crossing the canvas, mostly white, tells intricate stories. The exhibition in the gallery includes a few works displaying new style, marked by the use of a single color, black or red, or brush marks like dancing signs, making me feel as if I have seen a hallucination of imperfection still surrounding the artist. These paintings do not look healthy. I look forward to the second stage of the launch occurring in his art, or in the land of youth including him.”

 

4. Early Paintings of Water Drops: 1973-1979 

 

It was in 1973, when Kim Tschang-yeul had his first solo exhibition in Paris where he had settled down following his four-year residence and productivity while living in New York City, that the Korean newspapers abruptly covered the artist’s return. One of the first reports of this Paris solo exhibition, held from May 29 to July 31, 1973, came to introduce his water drop paintings to the Korean artworkand this article was published in the Chosun Ilbo, dated September 6 of that same year. The article was written by the foreign correspondent Sin Yong-seok, who provided accompanying photographs of the exhibited paintings and the artist standing in front of the exhibition venue. In this piece, under the headline “Unique Subject – Praised as ‘Rare Artistic Adventure’ by Salvador Dalí and Alain Bosquet,” Sin provided a detailed introduction of the water drop paintings displayed in the exhibition and added, “The paintings of solid spherical objects that he made from 1965 to 1969 during his stay in New York and those of mucous stuff that he produced in the following period, during which he moved to Paris, show the elements of connection with and continuity of these paintings of water drops in which he is keenly interested today. What is interesting is that these new paintings give the viewers an impression that they began, rather abruptly but concisely, to open the artist’s inner world. Today, the paintings are praised by Salvador Dalí and critics such as Alain Bosquet, who sees in them ‘a unique philosophy which goes together with materialist, financial, and artistic adventures, … new issues raised by the spirituality of a few water drops which modern art has never known, … the humble end of poetry leading to a resolute challenge going beyond a simple strange experience, … a rare hypnotic power.’”

In 1976, Korean newspapers published as much as 29 articles, the largest number until then, about the paintings of Kim Tschang-yeul largely because of his first solo exhibition of water drop paintings in Korea. The news of the exhibition first came from the article “Three Korean Artists in Paris – Exhibition on the Decade of Living Abroad,” published by Hankook Ilbo dated April 4, and “Exhibition of Water Drops for Debut in Korea,” an article in the JoongAng Ilbo written by correspondent Ju Seop-il. Most of the newspaper articles published after the exhibition were largely focused on the answers of the artist on the meaning and background of the water drops which he took as the main subject matter of his art.

 

“People often ask me why I paint water drops. It is not a simple question to answer. I only understood for myself many years later that the transparent objects I’d painted for such a long period were, in fact, water drops. […] They are like gems, although both are direct opposites in terms of solidity and value. […] Water drops remind me of gems because they are clear and bright. But they are so different because the water drops are so fragile and vanish so easily. I decided to paint water drops because I wanted to express something hidden behind them. […] Water drops are like gems in appearance, but these two things are both significantly different from each other regarding their solidness and value. The orientation of the pure and virtuous sensation is boundless.” (JoongAng Ilbo, May 14, 1976) Other articles cite similar answers: “The method of rendering water drops is an extension of the expression of dots. Water drops are ultimately transparent but the strong emotion that they create in us is quite different from what we get from simple dots.” “I was fascinated that water drops are as clear and bright as gems but so fragile that they exist for a pathetically short period of time. Drops of dew disappear as soon as they are hit by a sunray, and I love the imagery that they created. It was notexistential nihilism represent by Albert Camus that I sought, but rather the ideas of emptiness and fullness of Eastern philosophy.”

There were also articles focusing on the technique of hyperrealism used for the depiction of water drops. An article published in theHankook Ilbo (date unknown) dealt with the subject: “Kim’s paintings are truly unique. That is why even Western critics were puzzled by the technique he used for his works. His painting starts with the process of making small holes in the canvass and spraying transparent pigment into them. The shading effect is achieved as a result of the depth of the hole cut into the surface. The next working step involves making white dots on the numerous water drops sprinkled on the canvass until they become sparkling water drops.”

 

When his next solo exhibition was held three years later in 1979 at the Modern Art Gallery (HYUNDAI Hwarang) in Seoul, most of the newspaper reviews were now interested in whether or not there had been any significant changes made in his paintings of water drops presented in this event. He answered in one of the interviews: “In these new works I focused on a deeper world of joy. I wanted, for instance, to express a state of fullness through these translucent water drops. I wanted to reflect myself on them and approach a state of purity by excluding all that are outside the human world. In the past I created water drops by spraying water on oil paper using a compressor, but for these paintings I used only brushes to depict them. There is, of course, a marked difference between the earlier and these water drops, which are, I believe, more detailed and glistening.” (Shina Ilbo, June 8, 1979) In another interview, he said that there is no significant difference between the water drops in earlier works and those in the later paintings: “There is basically no difference in the water drops themselves. If there is, it should be that I tried to be free from what is conceptual and more faithful to the basics of painting. I turned from the mechanical method of using a sprayer to the use of brushes as an effort to increase the painterly quality. I have used brushes, though infrequently, in the past, and now I feel that a brush is much better than a sprayer in terms of the adhesion of water drops to the canvass.” (JoongAng Ilbo on June 6, 1976)

 

 

5. Birth and Growth of the Proper Noun, “Artist of Water Drops”: 1980-1999

 

Kim Tschang-yeul continued to be active in the 1980s with solo exhibitions held in many cities across Europe, New York, and Toronto. His activities, however, attracted little attention from the media in his home country, with only a few mentioning his name when they introduced their readers to successful Korean artists in the overseas art world or when he participated in the group exhibitions held in Korea. It was in 1983, when he held a solo exhibition at the Modern Art Gallery (HYUNDAI Hwarang) in Seoul, that the Korean newspapers revived their interest in his paintings, the changes made in the water drops over the last ten years, and the development of artistic forms and techniques.

 

“In these works I wanted to highlight the formativeness in the concept that I maintained. I tried, for example, to arrange the forms of water drops and their trails in symmetry and bring changes to the depiction of the water drops and the light. [...] It seems that there have been significant changes made over the past ten years. As for the paintings presented at the solo exhibition in 1976, I used small tools such as a sprayer or compressor according to my idea of the hand-equipment collaboration, but after 1979 I have painted using only my hands, that is, with brushes. In this exhibition, I will present paintings in which the form and translucence of water drops created by the refraction of light are highlighted and the objects are arranged on the space divided into two.” (Chosun Ilbo on September 7, 1983) Following the quotations from the interview with the artist, the reviewer ended his article with the following conclusion: “The water drops may be the same, but comparing with those presented to the Korean viewers in 1976 and 1979, the water drops in these new paintings are arranged formatively. Also, the water drops, and their trails are arranged to feature a sharp contrast, showing that the artist tried to express not conceptual water drops but rather those endowed with vitality as a painterly element.” In another review published by an unknown newspaper, the artist “explained that he left a simple concept of a water drop to intervene in the water drop trails in order to increase the effect of transparency and clarity of light, with the goal of reconciliation between water drops based on formativeness.” 

The name of Kim Tschang-yeul continued to appear in the Korean press after 1984 in connection with the participation of Korean art institutions in overseas art fairs, the exhibition marking the centenary of Korea-France diplomatic ties (1986), a large-scale prints exhibition, and, eventually, his solo exhibition held in 1987 which resulted in the appearance of the term ‘Later Water Drops Phase’, which summarized the paintings collected for this event. “The central works in this exhibition are also water drop paintings, but are visually different from the earlier works as they show various efforts leading to the characteristic features of the Later Water Drops Phase. While the water drops in the past featured thoroughly conceptual images marked by neutral coldness, these water drops have dark shadows and are placed against the brushstrokes of Chinese letters or other symbols. In addition, some of these works are not painted on canvass but on paper using the paper collage technique.” (Chosun Ilbo on September 12, 1987) It was in 1985 that Kim Tschang-yeul began to make important changes to his water drop paintings by introducing water drops with stains made by water permeated in the background or those hung on the lower end of the canvass. The new style made from such changes is represented by the paintings made under the title of Deconstruction, in which water drops are interspersed with brush strokes full of energy. As for the art critic Lee Yil, the new paintings “provide a space for new and sharply delineated experience for our viewpoint and consciousness by contrasting the water drops with another mode of existence.” There was also an article whose source is not known in which the reviewer quoted the artist’s famous remark: “They say that the great monk Dharma achieved spiritual enlightenment after wall-facing meditation for nine years, but for me such enlightenment is still far away even though I have been facing water drops for fifteen years.” The artist’s mention of “Bodhidharma” and “enlightenment” led the reviewer to conclude that the most significant development made for the new paintings was the element of the East Asian philosophy represented by the water drops placed against the background of Chinese characters: “The paintings in this exhibition show many interesting changes. The most significant change of them is the ambience of Eastern philosophy.” 

The connection between Kim’s new water drops paintings and the East Asian philosophical heritage was highlighted again in an interview that he had with a newspaper to mark the solo exhibition held in 1990: “To him [i.e. Kim Tschang-yeul], a water drop is something that exists but disappears at any moment, thus representing impermanence and meaninglessness. That is why the artist believes that the water drop contains the essence of ancient East Asian ideology. It was around 1986 that he began to leave hemp cloths and newspaper pages for the Chinese characters taken from some ancient classic texts such as the Thousand Character Classic(Qianziwen) and the Classic of the Way of Power (Daodejing). The early characters featured scripts taken from old woodblock-printed books and arranged in an orderly manner, but in the latest paintings the characters are in disarray, like those written for handwriting practice, with some illegible because they are overlapped.” The reviewer quoted the artist’s explanation with regard to the change: “I don’t know if it is because learning Chinese characters was an essential part of the formal education of my generation that I often deeply feel nostalgic about Chinese scripts. If you see Chinese characters, which are ideographic, representing the ideas rather than structures of the Chinese language, spread on the background of your painting, you become very sensitized to their ‘echo’. Place water drops, which soon disappear, on the background, and you feel that the tension, order, and harmony that they create are truly fresh.”

Strangely, however, the solo exhibition of Kim’s in 1990 did not seem to have the same frenetic media coverage that it deserved, as suggested by the fact that we could find no more newspaper articles about the event. Considering the various aspects of the activities in which he engaged during this period, the works of the Recurrence series produced after 1989 show the development in the use of Chinese characters for his water drop paintings, because, unlike the earlier paintings where the characters were merely part of the background, the characters in the new works are treated as equal with water drops. The Chinese characters now came to have the nature of objets d'art. It is quite notable that such an important change that occurred during the development of Kim Tschang-yeul’s art did not attract much attention from the Korean media.

 

Kim also participated in some of major art events held in Korea as part of the celebration for Korea’s successful hosting of the Seoul Olympic Games in 1988, such as the Korean Contemporary Art Festival and the Exhibition of Prints Collection in Commemoration of Olympiad. Newspaper articles in the early 1990s also show that in the following years he continued to participate in various annual art events such as the Korean Galleries Art Festival, Korea International Art Fair, and Ecole de Seoul, as well as special events organized by Korean art galleries such as the Exhibition of 25 Artists, Exhibition of Senior Artists, Five Contemporary Artists, Hangeul Sarang Korean Art Festival, Signs and Forms of Contemporary Art, Communication of Modern Art, and Art Prints. In 1992, an auction hosted by Sotheby's New York attracted nationwide media coverage, as it was the first event organized by the institution for the sale of seven Korean modern and contemporary artworks. Many newspapers reported that of the seven works only one water drop painting that Kim Tschang-yeul painted in 1973 was successfully bid out at 11,000 USD, which is in the midrange amount of its reserved price.

 

Such tendencies continued for several years afterward. As for the Kim’s solo exhibition held in 1993 at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, for example, the Korean press showed little interest, providing only short introductions of the event. For one newspaper, it was “an event to recollect the developments in the paintings by Kim, the Korean artist working in France who is famous for the paintings of water drops, through a collection of about one hundred paintings from the early spray works to the latest Recurrence series. (Chosun Ilbo on November 18, 1993)” An equally brief report was made by another newspaper: “It is Kim’s eighth solo exhibition in Korea, although he has had over fifty solo and international exhibitions in many countries across Europe, the US, and Japan. The exhibition presents over one hundred works, including the paintings of the 1950s. […] His paintings, focusing on a single subject matter for about twenty years since the first exhibition of Water Drops in 1973, contain a powerful sense of the East and various aspects of formativeness.” (Segye Ilbo on November 27, 1993) Interestingly, the MMCA exhibition seems to have become an opportunity to attract open criticism among the Korean critics. The art critic Lee Young-wook conveyed through his article “Variations of ‘Water Drops’ - Fetishism in the Guise of Philosophy,” published by an unknown newspaper, that in addition to the large number of admirers, there were, though few in number, critics maintaining negative attitudes toward Kim’s water drop paintings. “There is no doubt that his (Kim Tschang-yeul’s) paintings have made some changes of their own, although they had to be limited to a preset format (i.e. water drops formed on the surface of canvass).” For the background of his famous hydro motifs, for example, he changed hemp cloth to mulberry paper and newspaper, and, more recently, added Chinese scripts to the background. Even the water drops themselves the artist has shown variations in terms of form and state, with some existing alone while others are formed in visual clusters. There were water drops which are about cascading down, and some that are absorbed as water naturally dries or have permeated into the background of the composition. In addition, the artist even introduced in this exhibition as an installation work featuring a glass water drop, a fragile and elegant shape of his water drop motif and filled with real water and placed on an altar of sand. […] A water drop is simply a water drop, is it not? Imposing a philosophical idea which is so profound and hard to understand onto an object of specific form is, I think, a kind of violence and misuse or abuse of philosophy. For ordinary viewers, a meaning can only be obtained from the interrelations between what they can associate with a water drop and its specific form that the artist has represented on the canvass. No water drop can bear such a profound and seemingly boundless meaning by itself. As I saw the numerous, several thousands of water drops in this exhibition, I felt that it was a ‘water drop fetishism’ created by a violent combination between techniques and concepts and carefully managed for commercial purposes. I wondered what led this artist to such severe self-restriction and such a laborious, painful, time-consuming work. I would like to argue that the duty that remains to be fulfilled by the artist for the settlement of the current chaos is to maintain the wisdom with which he clearly identifies errors of the past and to not repeat them.” Critical reviews appeared again four years later when Kim Tschang-yeul had another solo exhibition in Seoul. A reporter in the Munhwa Ilbo commented that there were in the Korean art community some who “are tired of the dullness of the twenty-five years of water drops” (Munhwa Ilbo on August 28, 1997). “Kim Tschang-yeul has earned the title ‘artist of water drops’,” wrote another reviewer in a rather sarcastic manner, “for the works he has produced so far. He has earned fame and wealth from them as well. He still paints water drops.” (Hankook Ilbo on August 29, 1997)

 

New expressions began to appear in 1997 to define the water drop paintings further, showing a new fold in the ever-expanding visualization of hydrology. One of the new definitions, that the artist had attained mastery and was now creating a “world of water drops” filled with “nothingness,” is based on one of the interviews that he had with the Korean press: “[I continue to paint water drops] because it is an act of melting all beings into water drops and returning them to their original state of transparency, the state of ‘nothingness’ [無]. We will experience comfort and peace only when we return all of our rage, anxiety, and terror to ‘emptiness’ [虛]. Some artists work to expand their ‘ego’, but I seek the extinction of the ego. I am trying to find the means of expression for this quest in water drops.” (Dong-A Ilbo on August 25, and Segye Ilbo on September 2, 1997)

 

As briefly mentioned in earlier sections, apart from his solo exhibitions held in Korea every three or four years, Kim continued to participate in various art events held in Korea during this period, special exhibitions hosted by private or public art galleries, regular exhibitions held annually such as the Korean Art Print Festival and the Korean International Art Fair, auction events, art collector programs, and so on, which led Korean newspapers to publish his name over 100 times a year. Kim name would appear almost always at the top of the list of key participants when the press published reports of major art events, exploiting his name as a means to guarantee success or the importance of the events while increasing the cultural value and visibility of these events for public consumption. When Dong-A Ilbo reported that the head of a French copyright collection society was visiting Korea on April 23, 1998, for example, it contained the following sentences: “Established by artists in 1953, this society is joined by around 28,000 artists, of which around 5,000 are French. Kim Tschang-yeul, the artist of water drops, is also a member of the society, and the annual income that it makes through the management of the copyrights of its members is about 70,000,000 French franc every year.” The Hankyore also mentioned his name when it reported on the closure of Arko Art Center: “Such big-name artists as Park Seo-Bo, Kim Tschang-yeul, Yun Suk-nam, and Lee Bann held their exhibitions here when they were struggling to bring their dreams to life.”

One interesting fact regarding the articles written about Kim during this period is that his name is almost always joined with epithets such as “painter of water drops,” “famous as a painter of water drops,” “known as the painter of water drops,” “well known for water drops,” and “nicknamed as the painter of water drops.” An article in Segye Ilbo, for instance, published for the introduction of the art exhibition, Meaning of Scripts as Visual Images in Art, held at the Gana Art Center in Seoul on January 21, 1999, contained the following sentence: “After the 1980s, Mr. Kim Tschang-yeul, who is famous as the painter of water drops, began to add the meaning of time to his art through the formativeness of Chinese characters, which are logograms, selected from the Thousand Character Classic.” A review of the Park Seo-Bo solo exhibition published in the Seoul Shinmun on March 18, 2002 also used the epithet, although it was not directly related to Kim Tschang-yeul: “In 1956, he (Park) announced the ‘Anti-Gukjeon Declaration’ arguing that the Gukjeon (the National Art Exhibition of Korea) was still blindly following the outmoded art style of Japan and played a key role, together with the ‘artist of water drops’ Kim Tschang-yeul, in the Informel Movement that opened a new epoch for the Korean contemporary art.” Many other reviewers used the same epithets when writing about Kim Tschang-yeul. It is probably one of the two most widely accepted epithets in the Korean art world, the other being that describing Nam June Paik (1932-2006) as the “the world-famous video artist.” Korea has several great names of modern artists, such as Kim Whan-ki, Lee Jung-seob, Park Seo-Bo, and Lee Ufan, who are readily comparable with or regarded as greater than Kim Tschang-yeul, but none of these masters are given such a famous epithet as Kim. For the ordinary art-loving public in the 1990s, Kim Tschang-yeul was not one of those ordinary artists whose name happened to be Kim Tschang-yeul, but one who is clearly different from his contemporary artists for the unique brand represented by the descriptive phrase, “the artist of water drops.”

 

6. Definitions of “Water Drops” and the Birth of a Myth: 2000-2016 

 

Korean newspaper articles focusing on the solo exhibition in 2000 of Kim’s more mature work, at the time in his seventies, shows the tendency of trying to interpret the water drops as a symbol of cosmic circulation or the essence of Eastern philosophy. The reviewers’ attention has now turned from the changes or new aspects that occurred in his paintings to a comprehensive view of his art where he “has been committed to capturing the order of the cosmos contained in a water drop, or the evanescence of life.” The reviews of the art of Kim Tschang-yeul written during this period often cited his statement which had been quoted quite frequently in 1997: “It is an act of melting all beings into water drops and returning them to their original state of transparency, the state of ‘nothingness’. We will experience comfort and peace only when we return all of our rage, anxiety, and terror to ‘emptiness’. Some artists work to expand their ‘ego’, but I seek the extinction of the ego.” Another quotation preferred by the reviewers during this period was: “I (Kim Tschang-yeul) paint [water drops] as my daily routine, just like farmers till their land, monks chant sutras, and children dabble in the stream.”

It was during this period that articles began to appear making “fake myths” about Kim Tschang-yeul. One of the myths asserts that Kim Tschang-yeul had his first exhibition in Paris at a carpenter’s shop which happened to be visited by a local newspaper reporter. The reporter wrote about it for the newspaper that employed him that “a painter from Asia presents odd paintings in a strange venue.” The news happened to catch the attention of the French poet and critic Alain Bosquet, who in turn visited the exhibition and wrote a review of his experience for Le Monde, resulting in attention drawn from the Paris artist community. Another mythic trope is connected with the paintings titled Recurrence. The artist originally thought of “Goddess Magu and the Altar of Immortality” for the title of his new painting, series but changed his mind and chose “Recurrence” instead, because the title based on the Chinese goddess of health may not be well understood among his fans across the world (Maeil Business Newspaper on June 23, 2000). Except for some articles which contain exaggerated accounts of the artist, most reviews produced in this period were focused on the delivery of the old master’s philosophical depth by comparing his subject matter with the mysteries of the universe.

 

The articles of Kim Tschang-yeul published in 2002 by many Korean newspapers were largely focused on the invitational exhibition that he would receive at the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris two years later and the development of his art from the Informel period to the exhibition at Salon de Mai in Paris in 1972, and the later process during which his art continued to evolve to be nearer to the state of the universe housing all of creation. Many newspaper articles written during this period were interested in summarizing all of his artistic achievements. When an interviewer asked him why it should be water drops, he answered: “Why water drops? … Well, I think that such a question sounds much like why Gregor Samsa should be transformed into a beetle in the Franz Kafka’s novella The Metamorphosis. It is known that he answered because a beetle was the most mean, worthless insect. I can give you a similar answer. For me, a water drop is the most insignificant entity, but gives me an incomparable joy.” (Seoul Shinmun, August 27, 2002) For the criticisms on his adherence to water drops for his entire career, he answered: “It may be for lack of talent, but I often feel that just struggling with water drops is already too much for me. I’d like to delve in the water drop alone for my entire life until I can touch its soul.” (Dong-A Ilbo on August 28, 2002) When criticized for either “a lack of artistic ambition for the new” or “being overly sensitive to satisfy the tastes of the public,” he argued: “what is important is not the selection of subject matter, but how to touch the heart of the viewers with it.” (Kookmin Ilbo on September 30, 2004). He believed that there were “still endless things that you can express with water drops,” while “there have been many great artists in this world, but none who captured the soul. The question was not one of subject matter, but how they would touch human beings through it.” He was “attracted to water drops glistening with a ray of sunshine, just like you are drawn to a beautiful woman.” For the question of why he painted only water drops, he answered: “I have been faithful to one woman for thirty-five years.” (Munhwa Ilbo on October 24, 2004)

 

Following the exhibition at Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris in 2004, Kim Tschang-yeul had a large solo retrospective exhibition at the National Museum of China the following year. He continued to hold solo exhibitions in Korea as well, at the Galerie Bhak in 2005, Pyo Gallery in 2006, GALLERY HYUNDAI in 2007, 2010, and 2013, Busan Museum of Art in 2009, and Gwangju Museum of Art in 2014.

In 2013, Kim turned eighty-four years old and to mark his octogenarian decade on earth, a major exhibition commemorating the fifty years he had spent as an artist was commissioned. At the press conference held to mark the event, participants asked questions such as “Aren’t you tired of painting only water drops?” “How many assistants do you have?” “Has there been any change in the meaning of the water drops?” and “Is there any difference between your latest and the earlier paintings?” The artist answered the last question by saying, “It’s the same.” (Hankook Ilbo on August 25, 2013) “They may look like the same water drops. But all are different, just as we human beings are. […] Trying to see what is not seen is art. I always painted water drops, but tried to capture what is beyond them.” (The Herald Business, August 21, 2013) Reviewers tended to interpret the artist’s resoluteness in connection with his philosophy and aestheticism, concluding “the water drops, expressed for their own philosophy of life with reserved colors and themes, tell the story of a space both empty and filled, as well as of birth and death.” The artist reads the destiny of human beings from the water drops, which give glorious sparkling for a brief moment before evaporating, and (re)defines the form of water drops as the final form at which the archetype of human life and injury have arrived through continuous evolution. That is why be believes that his water drop paintings were treated with such familiarity among the public and readily accepted by them. When asked how he wanted to be remembered in history, he answered “not as a worthless artist.” About the meaning of the word “worthless,” he answered “the state of not worth being.” (Chosun Ilbo, August 22, 2013) “Painters tend to be misguided, believing that they can reach the soul if they keep painting.” The question as to why he painted only water drops for all of his life does not seem to be relevant to the old master who has devoted his whole life to painting under such an illusion. 

 

Conclusion 

 

This study dealt with how the paintings of Kim Tschang-yeul were interpreted and transmitted by the public through analysis of Korean newspaper articles written about the artist for the sixty years or so from the 1950s through 2016. A total of around 2,400 articles were collected for this study, which was conducted as part of the project for the construction of the digital archives of old masters in Korean art.

It was during the mid-1950s that Kim Tschang-yeul appeared in the Korean art world as one of the proponents of the avant-garde movement to reform art in Korea. He became famous among the Korean art-loving public after the successful exhibition of water drop paintings in Paris during the early 1970s. The articles on his art published by the Korean press from 1976 to 2016, when his art gallery was established in Jeju-do, are mostly focused on questions about the meaning of water drops, the subject matter that charmed the artist for his entire life as an artist.   

Why should the water drop become the central visual motif and a kind of “liquid modernity,” to borrow from Zygmund Bauman, to tell this artist’s views on life and lifeworld? On this question, Kim Tschang-yeul had several different versions of his answer. At first, he talked of the times when he was living as a poor artist at a stable in the suburban area of Paris where one day, as he was spraying a used canvass to remove pigment stuck on the surface so that he could reuse it, he discovered some water drops whose beauty mesmerized him instantly. At another point he said, “One day I filled a basin with water, and as I was washing my face with the water it splashed onto the canvass which happened to be beside the basin. It was then that I saw the water drops in various sizes glistening gracefully in the rays of morning sunlight.” (Munhwa Ilbo, September 13, 2013) Reporters and critics continued to ask similar questions about the water drops, likely because his readers in Korea seemed to be more interested in the objects depicted in such a remarkably realistic manner that they look almost more real than other aesthetic elements of his paintings.

The questions about the meaning of water drops have also continued for about fifty years. Kim Tschang-yeul once explained in one of his early answers, “Water drops remind me of gems because of their sparkling light and beauty. But the two are so different because the water drops are so fragile and vanish in an instant. I decided to paint water drops not simply because I wanted to capture their appearance, but rather something hidden behind them.” Later, he became more philosophical: “A water drop is an object which exists one moment but no longer in the next, thus representing impermanence and meaninglessness. That is why it transcends to the spiritual and philosophical meaning symbolizing the essence of ancient East Asian ideology.” Kim Tschang-yeul painted water drops for over fifty years because, as he said in his later years, “It is an act of melting all beings into water drops and returning them to their original state of transparency, the state of ‘nothingness’ [無]. We will experience comfort and peace only when we return all of our rage, anxiety, and terror to ‘emptiness’ [虛]. Some artists work to expand their ‘ego’, but I seek the extinction of the ego. I am trying to find the means of expression for this quest in water drops.”

 

“People often ask me why I paint water drops. It is not a simple question to answer. I only understood for myself many years later that the transparent objects I’d painted for such a long period were, in fact, water drops.” (Hankook Ilbo on unknown date in 1976)

 

“Water drops have no meaning. If you ask me why I stick to them despite the meaninglessness, I would say that it is because I am foolish.” (Kookmin Ilbo on September 25, 2016)

 

The two quotations above, one from 1976 when his first water drop paintings were open to the Korean public and the other taken from an interview in 2016 in connection with the opening of his commemorative gallery in Jeju-do, may be closer to the most frank answer given by the artist.

 

Most of the newspaper articles of Kim Tschang-yeul written during the past fifty years were typically published in connection with his solo exhibitions held in Korea, and accordingly reflect the ideas that the artist temporarily had at the relevant time as well as the interests and responses of the ordinary art-loving public. In this study, I wanted to find a certain theme that flows through the numerous articles written for the last fifty years, and to explain the development of the art of Kim Tschang-yeul through all these years and how it has been transmitted to the public. This study would not have been possible without the work of collecting and sorting out the documents of his paintings, exhibitions, newspaper reviews, and other written materials conducted for the construction of the digital archives of Korean modern and contemporary art. I expect that, once completed, the archives will be productively utilized by future researchers who would expand and deepen the studies focusing on subjects similar with the one for this study, because the digital archives will surely help the researchers to save a significant amount of time and energy in their study. I hope that more and more researchers will find the remarkable capacity of the archives to enrich their knowledge and research.

No data available.