Kim Yun Shin: Pursuing Integration Beyond Boundaries

Kim Yisoon (Principal Researcher)

I. Introduction

Kim Yun Shin (金允信, born 1935) stands as a singular figure in Korean art, virtually unparalleled among her contemporaries. Since entering art college in 1955 to study sculpture, she has devoted herself exclusively to creative work for 70 years, never seeking to promote herself but focusing solely on artistic creation. Though commonly referred to as a first-generation Korean female sculptor, such qualifiers seem unnecessary for Kim. She has used power tools like chainsaws and grinders—tools previously employed by neither female nor male sculptors—to cut through hardwood and stone. Following her specialization in lithography at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, she has also worked freely between painting and sculpture, recently pioneering a unique genre of “painting-sculpture.” Throughout her career, Kim has built her artistic world with complete freedom, unbound by conventional norms or boundaries of genre, materials, or techniques.

Only recently has the Korean art world begun to pay proper attention to Kim. Perhaps because she spent the past 40 years of her career in Argentina, her work received little recognition in Korea. Though her exhibitions were held consistently in Korea, only fragmentary newspaper articles covered these shows. Finally, through the special exhibition Kim Yunshin: Towards Oneness (February 28 – May 7, 2023) at Nam-Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, her artistic world could be properly surveyed, drawing attention from both the art world and the public. In 2024, she was invited to participate in the main exhibition of the Venice Biennale, establishing herself as a global artist within just one or two years. This archival research follows Kim’s 70-year creative journey since entering college, organizing not only her artworks but also related materials.

The exact number of works Kim has created cannot be determined precisely. Few works from before 1970 survive, aside from some prints and drawings. During her four years in college, she worked daily in the college studio, creating figure sculptures using clay modeling techniques, and during her Paris studies, she created experimental three-dimensional works using various materials while specializing in lithography. However, only a few of these early pieces can be confirmed through black-and-white photographs. After her stay in Paris, she began working seriously in both two and three dimensions, starting to create wood sculptures, but most works from this period were scattered when she moved to Argentina, with only a few surviving. Fortunately, most works from her Argentine period survive. Even for those in private collections or with unknown locations, photographic documentation exists, allowing for a detailed examination of her creative journey.

This archival research has cataloged approximately 1,700 works: roughly 1,200 two-dimensional works and 500 sculptures. The two-dimensional works include lithographs, fabric collages, works applying printmaking techniques, oil paintings, and acrylic paintings. Her three-dimensional works are predominantly wood sculptures, with a considerable number made from onyx and semiprecious stones, including granite public sculptures. Unfortunately, her early works in clay modeling with plaster or cement and welded iron works can only be confirmed through the National Art Exhibition catalogs and black-and-white photographs in the artist’s possession.

Overall, her paintings (two-dimensional works) far outnumber her sculptures. This is because, since specializing in lithography at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, she has continued two-dimensional work in various ways. Particularly during her Argentine period, when she devoted herself entirely to work, she created sculptures during the day and constantly drew in the evenings, during rest, or even while traveling. In Kim’s artistic world, the relative importance of sculpture and painting cannot be measured. These two domains are inseparable, naturally emerging products of her life. This essay examines her artistic world encompassing both sculpture and painting. As her life and art are inextricably connected, a brief overview of her life is presented first.

II. Kim Yun Shin’s Life and the Art of “For a Moment, This Moment”

For Kim Yun Shin, life is art, and art is life. Even at ninety, she immerses herself in work except during mealtimes. Typically, aging artists employ assistants and receive physical help for demanding work. However, Kim has created countless works without relying on others. Like any artist, she works in direct response to her materials—whether wood or canvas—translating thoughts and feelings of in that exact moment into her art. She believes that a fleeting instant can determine everything and contains her entire being. Though she first used “For a moment, This moment” as a work title in 2020, she has maintained this attitude of valuing each moment throughout her life and creative practice, likely rooted in her childhood experiences.

Born in Wonsan, Gangwon-do, in 1935, Kim moved with her mother to the nearby town of Anbyeon while still a small child. She remained there until the late autumn 1947, when she came south to meet her older brother. She was the fifth daughter among six children (one son and five daughters), with an older brother immediately above her in age. Brother Kim Guk-ju was the only son to carry on the family line of the Uiseong Kim clan and was the most esteemed member of the Kim family. However, he went to China to avoid conscription and joined the independence movement activities. As a child, Kim witnessed scenes of Japanese exploitation, including the requisition of metal goods and pine resin collection, and saw her mother’s ritual of offering purified water while praying for her brother’s safety daily.

During summer vacation in 1945, she went to visit her father who practiced traditional medicine in the Mudanjiang region of China, experienced liberation there, and returned alone to her home in Anbyeon. While crossing the Tumen River on her return journey, she witnessed innocent people dying. Because her brother, who had been active in the independence movement, was living in Seoul, she and her mother crossed the 38th parallel to meet him—facing moments of life and death along the way. During the Korean War, the mountains of corpses and the Hangang River stained red with blood that she witnessed in Seoul were too terrible and tragic. Having faced death repeatedly during childhood, Kim deeply realized how precious “for a moment, this moment” was, and she has lived her entire life without wasting a single moment, devoting herself entirely to creation without interest in anything else. Her artworks are like a massive tower built from countless captured moments.

III. The Artistic World of “Hap-i-hap-il Bun-i-bun-il (Add Two Add One, Divide Two Divide One)”

Kim Yun Shin uses the philosophical concept “Add Two Add One, Divide Two Divide One (hap-i-hap-il bun-i-bun-il; 合二合一 分二分一)” as titles for her wood sculptures. She has explained the meaning of this concept as follows.

“The principles of addition (合) and division (分) are the source of Eastern philosophy and the foundation on which the world exists. I have been pursuing this philosophy since 1975 and titled my works ‘Add Two Add One, Divide Two Divide One (合二 合一 分二 分一).’ In this dynamic, two entities come together and form a union as one, and this union becomes divided into two again. And then, as in the case of human existence, the process of addition and division are repeated continually and infinitely. The lines and planes created by my chainsaw based on the process of division are, in this view, at once an addition and a division. My mind, my existence, and my soul become a unified one.”

“Add Two Add One, Divide Two Divide One,” though a sculpture title, is a philosophy permeating not only her sculptures but her entire art. The notion that two converge into one and then divide again to expand infinitely is both her life philosophy and Christian spirit, manifested through sculptures, paintings, and recent “painting-sculpture.” This essay examines this in detail through different periods.

1. 1955–1960s: Encountering Printmaking on the Path to Becoming a Sculptor

From entering art college in 1955 to graduation in 1959, Kim Yun Shin created human figures through clay modeling. Though she created realistic human figures, as confirmed by her National Art Exhibition submissions, she attempted various stylistic changes—generally slender figurative sculptures in plaster or cement. After rigorously mastering basic techniques through clay modeling, she sought her own sculptural language. During college, she studied sculpture under Yoon Hyo-joong (1917–1967), who graduated from the Department of Sculpture in Tokyo University of the Arts, and Kim Chung-sook (1917–1991), who had learned iron welding sculpture in America. However, she only began seriously creating iron and wood works after graduation, moving beyond clay modeling techniques. With her 1963 exhibition Dobuljeon (exhibition held right before departing for France), she created works abstracting human figures, cats, and birds, as well as nonobjective abstract works.

Then, she departed for Paris in December 1964. After entering the Sculpture Department of the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in early 1965, she began studying sculpture but had to transfer because of her supervising professor’s sudden death, moving to the Printmaking Department to specialize in lithography. Specializing in printmaking in Paris was something of an accident.” However, it opened an unexpected path for Kim. While specializing in lithography in Paris, she continued to sculpt and became an artist who freely traversed between three-dimensional and two-dimensional work throughout her life. Kim’s Paris-era sculptures, now accessible only through photographs, were mostly relief works in the Art Informel style. She repurposed non-artistic materials such as egg packaging, glass bottles, and gourd bowls brought from Korea, breaking them apart and pouring plaster over them to fix their form. The irregular forms that dominate suggest influence from Art Informel. However, these irregular relief works were not expressions of the existentialism or anxiety that general Art Informel art contained but metaphors for the freedom she felt in Paris.

During her time in Paris, while creating Art Informel works, Kim also explored linear abstract art through repeated line-drawing exercises. Through works composed of countless lines in her lithograph Premonition series, we can glimpse the tendencies she pursued then, and lines later became important formal elements in both Kim’s sculpture and painting. She returned to Korea in April 1969 and held a homecoming exhibition at Sinmun Hoegwan Gallery titled Kim Yun Shin Marble Lithograph Exhibition (July 25–29, 1969). Contemporary newspapers introduced it as “a unique exhibition, the first of its kind in Korea.”

2. 1970s–Mid-1980s: Pursuing Union with the Absolute Through “Printing” and “Stacking”

After returning to Korea, Kim did not continue lithography. It was difficult to find presses for lithography in Korea, so instead, she continued two-dimensional work through “printing” that applies printmaking techniques. She applied printmaking ink to everyday objects and stamped them onto paper or canvas or rubbed ink onto fabric with a roller, cut it, and used it for collage, creating unconventional “prints on canvas” that garnered attention. In the 1972 Myth of the Constellations series, she expressed color fields by applying paint to sponges and stamping them, and in other works, she stamped circular patterns using the bottom of brush caps. She even created abstract paintings through unconventional methods, such as flicking architectural chalk lines onto canvas. During this period, she sometimes expressed the same content in both painting and sculpture. For example, she created faith-confessing works through the cross: the oil painting Cross in 1972 and the cement sculpture Aspirational Desire in 1973.

She also combined two and three dimensions in single works. Eternal Guardian of Freedom-Loving People of Peace, her 1973 São Paulo Biennale submission, was a structure of large and small boxes stacked in a cross formation. She made wooden boxes, wrapped them in hanji (traditional Korean paper), and stamped circular images with printing ink and red ink or drew talisman-like forms. This work, which combined two and three dimensions and united Christian and shamanistic elements, exemplifies an early manifestation of Kim’s lifelong philosophy of “Add Two Add One, Divide Two Divide One.”

In the early 1970s, Kim was deeply immersed in Christianity, repeatedly expressing triangular forms representing the Holy Trinity and creating numerous works reflecting the religious awareness that “art is a reflection of the inner soul.” From the mid-1970s, while concentrating on wood sculpture without presenting paintings, the artistic philosophy formed during this period remained largely unchanged throughout her life. Shortly after settling in Argentina, she created Wish (1984) using locally available dyed burlap fabric in collage technique. This color field abstraction, created by cutting and pasting red, green, blue, and ochre burlap fabric in geometric forms, shares formal and conceptual elements with the previously examined 1975 work Aspirational Desire.

Compared to the prominent Christian elements in her two-dimensional works before departing for Argentina, traditional shamanic elements were prominent in her wood sculptures. Since the aforementioned Eternal Guardian of Freedom-Loving People of Peace, Kim created wood sculptures through “stacking” methods in the 1970s. She physically stacked wood pieces or created forms resembling stacked structures in her Prayer Stacking series. Various vertical columnar works can trace their origins to jangseung (traditional Korean wooden totem poles), sotdae (bird totem poles), pagodas, and columns of wooden architecture. However, the direct background of this Prayer Stacking series is personal. It originated from memories of her mother, who, every day, placed purified water at the earthenware jar stand at dawn and prayed for the safety of her son, the only male heir of three generations, and Kim’s own memories of collecting and stacking pebbles beside her mother while praying. The vertical works express the desire for human aspirations to reach heaven. Meanwhile, during the same period, Kim also created works revealing attachment to life. Two-Stage One-Seat (1976), also called Source of Life, features large and small masses attached to an upright wooden column, formalizing life, which the artist considered important. The emphasis on vitality is also evident in using wood bark without stripping it from the work.

From around 1978, she erected logs with the bark intact, cutting chunks from the middle sections. Unlike conventional wood sculpture methods of carving and refining wood piece by piece to create forms, she characteristically created space through color contrast between bark and flesh while leaving the bark intact and hollowing out sections of the wood. By not modifying the inherent form of raw wood and infusing the artist’s spirit (soul) into the material as it exists, works are born where the material and artist’s energy unite as one. It was precisely during this period that she began using the title “Add Two, Add One,” and Kim concretized the philosophical concept of “Add Two Add One, Divide Two Divide One” that she would use throughout her life.

3. Late 1980s–2000: Expressing Life Through “Cutting” Techniques

Kim Yun Shin, who had an attachment to wood, traveled to Argentina in December 1983, settled there, and worked for forty years before returning to Korea in February 2024. In the early period of her Argentine settlement, as mentioned earlier, she created collage works by cutting ready-made, colored burlap fabric. However, as she became fascinated by wood and settled in Argentina, she devoted herself to wood sculpture. She also briefly stayed in Mexico and Brazil to create stone sculptures. Because these were all hard materials, she concentrated on creating sculptural works through the unique method of “cutting.”

In the early period of her Argentina settlement, like in Korea, she erected raw logs vertically and carved them from various angles or created works with organic masses connected. She held her first solo exhibition in Argentina at the Buenos Aires Museum of Modern Art (Olavarría Botanical Garden outdoor exhibition space, September 20 – October 20, 1985) with vertical columnar works. Her unique sculptural method received high praise, and famous Argentine architect Mario Garone (1928–1991) brought her a truckload of Argentina’s hard, high-quality logs. These trees were so hard that they could not be sculpted with ordinary saws, chisels, or adzes, so she used chainsaws. She had no choice but to sculpt using chainsaws with “cutting” techniques, which naturally caused formal changes in Kim’s sculpture.

Chainsaws require high concentration because they are heavy, fast-moving, and powerful. Kim works by creating one surface through a single cut with the chainsaw, then making another cut in relation to that surface to create space. In this sense, cutting is not ending the tree’s life but creating space for the tree to breathe—that is, a method of breathing life back into the tree. This absolutely requires the artist’s intuition along with high concentration. The artist concentrates on work for hours, literally putting her “whole soul” into cutting hardwood to complete a piece. Her works are literally born from a state where material and artist achieve unity.

Each of Kim’s works has a different form, which results not from the artist carving wood with specific shapes in mind but from taking the form and nature of the raw wood itself as a starting point, as well as the feelings and thoughts of the moment of creating the work influencing the work. Since every moment is new, each sculpture takes a different shape. Among them are cross forms, and objects she witnessed and experienced in Argentina are formalized in various ways. For example, Two Obelisks (1993), made from cedar 220 cm high, might be thought to relate to ancient Egyptian culture because of its “obelisk” title, but it is actually a work inspired by the obelisk erected in downtown Buenos Aires. However, it is not necessary to relate the upright forms of Kim’s works specifically to this obelisk. She had already been creating vertically oriented forms since the 1970s. In other words, while drawing inspiration from the nature and culture in which she resided, Kim’s working method was to project these elements onto the materials she encountered in the present, combining them with emotions and feelings accumulated in her inner self, rather than directly expressing such elements in her works.

The 2002 work Add Two Add One, Divide Two Divide One (original title: Two Towers of Babel) is a vertical work with triangular and zigzag patterns carved in stepped formations. Its composition as a pair, with the rough and bold carvings of the wood trunk, evokes the forms of Cheonhadaejanggun and Jihayeojanggun (traditional Korean guardian totems), which is in the same context as Tower of Babel Stacking created in 1974. The zigzag patterns are expressed as high relief protrusions, which correspond to the iguana spine expression among Argentine woodcrafts in Kim’s collection. The surface also features equilateral triangles, symbols of the Holy Trinity, that are repeatedly carved. By melting various elements she had absorbed rather than specific cultures or materials into a single work, Kim formalized the primordial human desire to communicate with the absolute, transcending general notions or existing symbolism.

During this period, Kim also created stone sculptures. When thinking of stone sculpture, one would imagine the method of creating forms by chiseling marble or granite masses with chisels. Still, Kim created stone sculptures using completely different methods at that time. From 1989 to 1992, she spent three months each year in Puebla Tecali, Mexico, a place famous for onyx deposits, to create onyx sculpture works. Because onyx is extremely hard, it is impossible to create any form by chiseling with tools, and it is difficult to find production methods other than cutting techniques with grinders. While the grinder blade rotated, water dropped from above to manage heat, and she polished the cut stone with sand and water to bring out beautiful colors. Sometimes, she created works utilizing the rough surface texture and color of the stone. Once again, Kim, through an acquaintance’s introduction, began working with semiprecious stones in Brazil. From late 2001 to early 2002, she created sculptures with semiprecious stones even harder than onyx. The process was similar but required an even more arduous process because they were about 20% stronger than onyx. The method involved pouring special oil rather than water into the grinder to rotate the machine and cut the stone.

Onyx and semiprecious stones are incomparably harder than wood, requiring patience, and it is difficult to find sculptural methods other than “cutting” in straight lines. Moreover, since the color or patterns of the stone cannot be discerned at all in the raw state, one must draw out the inherent qualities and beauty of the raw stone while proceeding with cutting. Therefore, strong patience and intuition were necessary to create stone sculptures at that time. Kim’s stone sculptures, created by overcoming such difficulties, have a fantastical atmosphere and rich texture different from the heaviness of wood. By maximizing the natural texture of the raw stone to reveal the inherent beauty of the material itself, as Oh Kwang-su expressed, they make one “actually feel the mysterious cosmic harmony hidden within the stone.” As one example, Add Two Add One, Divide Two Divide One (No. 719) involved no further intervention beyond cutting a semicircular mass into a fanlike spread form to create the basic shape. The purple color of the raw stone revealed on the smooth cut surface harmonizes with the irregular color patterns of brown and white that wrapped the surface. Thus, Kim created stone sculptures with a strong painterly quality that fully preserved the mysterious patterns hidden in onyx and semiprecious stones and the diversity of orange, blue, red, and purple colors.

Kim regards the work itself as “prayer.” If in the early period she symbolically expressed the desire to communicate with the absolute through vertical columnar forms, during this period, the act of working with chainsaws or grinders itself became a prayer, and she worked with the earnest desire to become a person who conforms to God’s will. As a result, works born from the integration of the artist’s spirit, which she also calls “yeong (spirit),” and matter (wood, stone) truly conform to the proposition “Add Two Add One, Divide Two Divide One.”

4. 2000s–2010s: Singing of Life and Soul Through “Coloring” and “Scratching”

Kim Yun Shin arrived in Argentina and mainly created sculptures using “cutting” techniques. After immersing herself in sculpting with hard materials like palo santo, algarrobo, and quebracho wood, as well as onyx and semiprecious stones, she resumed painting in 1997. Although she had consistently worked on two-dimensional pieces, specializing in lithography until moving to Argentina, she took up the brush again after briefly setting it aside. From 2000 to the early 2020s, she created over 800 oil and acrylic paintings. Kim’s two-dimensional works far outnumber her three-dimensional works partly because of the difficulty of working with hard materials, and also because she created sculptural works during the day and constantly painted in the evenings, during rest, and even while traveling.

The sizes of her paintings vary, and she painted with brushes or sometimes applied paint to the canvas surface and created patterns by scratching with palette knives or everyday objects before it dried. She also resumed the object stamping she had started in the 1970s. Overall, her abstract works feature large and small dots, straight or curved lines, triangles, squares, circles, zigzag patterns, checkerboard patterns, and organic forms reminiscent of plant shapes like leaves and flowers or fans. For example, Joy (2002) overflows with vitality as geometric forms like triangles and circles, diagonal lines crossing between them, or flame patterns flow freely across the canvas. Such formal characteristics can be understood as extensions of early 1970s works expressed by stamping objects but are also related to the diagonal lines repeatedly drawn on wood sculptures around that time. Another work, Jubilance (2006), is composed of semicircular or rectangular color fields without specific forms, primarily using colors centered on the traditional Korean five colors: red, yellow, blue, cyan, green, black, and white. Characteristically, it expresses lines by scratching paint layers with a knife. She expressed countless gentle lines through scratching work along with paint application work, resulting in a sense of vitality as if the canvas vibrates.

Kim’s paintings also have Christian symbolism and basically formalize the artist’s inner world, presented in series such as A World  Beyond (2000), Joy (2000–2003), Primal Vitality (2000, 2003–2006), Song of My Soul (2006–2018), Prayer of My Soul (2014), Granted Wishes (2017–2018), Vibration (2018–2019), Fragments of Memories (2019–2020), and For a moment – This moment (2020–2022). These series are not entirely separate from each other. Rather than finishing one series and starting a new one, she completes paintings according to her intuition and inner resonance at the time of creation and then titles the works according to their atmosphere. Therefore, multiple series were sometimes created in the same year. Particularly, Song of My Soul continued for 12 years with an overwhelmingly large number of works, and its production period overlaps with other series.

During this period, she also began introducing color to her wood sculptures. The 2001 work Add Two Add One, Divide Two Divide One has color on the work’s surface. Just as the South American Mapuche people painted on their bodies, Kim also began coloring the surfaces of her wood sculptures. Though the zigzag patterns and colors came from Mapuche culture, by carving equilateral triangles, which the artist considers symbols of the Holy Trinity, she sought to combine indigenous culture and Christian culture in one work, showing the unity of different cultures. Afterward, she actively introduced coloring to wood sculptures.

5. Post-2019: Unity Through “Assemblage” and “Painting-Sculpture”

The pandemic also brought changes to Kim’s wood sculpture methods. When the COVID-19 outbreak led to restrictions, preventing people over 70 from going outside in Argentina, and Kim could no longer obtain wood needed for sculpture, she recycled wood fragments from her surroundings. Collecting miscellaneous wood pieces to create works, she applied color to unify the different types of wood and the diverse kinds of surfaces. Though she had colored sculpture surfaces before, in this case, rather than partial coloring, she painted entire works with color then drew various motifs on top as if painting on canvas. The artist calls this “painting-sculpture.”

In Kim’s case, she had colored entire sculpture surfaces even before the pandemic. The 2019 work Add Two Add One, Divide Two Divide One 2019-No.21 was created by cutting down a mulberry tree that had grown too large at home. When Kim combines waste wood to make wood sculptures and paints on their surfaces, she draws different pictures on each of the four sides. This can be seen as a new concept of colored sculpture. When combining waste wood pieces, she joins them to look different from all four directions and draws different pictures on each face, so one three-dimensional work allows for the appreciation of four paintings together.

The method of expressing each of the four faces differently in one work had already begun in her earlier woodwork. When cutting wood with chainsaws, she primarily cuts diagonally rather than horizontally or vertically. By varying the angles of the cutting surfaces and precisely calculating the cuts, her wood sculptures convey a very structural and dynamic feel. Drawing different pictures on the four faces produces the same effect. Even in freestanding sculptures, a front face typically exists, and when viewing a work from the front, one can generally predict the form of the back. However, Kim’s “painting-sculptures” have no “front face,” and when appreciating the work, it is difficult to predict faces other than the one being viewed.

Having studied sculpture and printmaking, Kim consistently worked between three-dimensional and two-dimensional forms, ultimately creating a new genre called “painting-sculpture” by drawing individual pictures on each of the four faces of three-dimensional works. This new conceptual genre of “painting-sculpture,” which integrates both genres without emphasizing either painting or sculpture, can be interpreted in the context of another “Add Two Add One, Divide Two Divide One.”

“Painting-sculptures” are light and full of vitality. The sculpture’s surfaces are filled with various color combinations and diverse patterns. She says that during the pandemic when going out became difficult, she imagined her pure childhood in Anbyeon. With few friends, everything from trees to insects became her companions, and the seemingly cascading constellations in the night sky would spark her imagination. She freely draws these childhood memories into her pictures to stimulate viewers’ imagination. Additionally, color draws attention, with independent pastel-toned bright colors and bold color contrasts. Her favorite combinations of sky blue and pink, green and red or orange are closer to Argentine traditions than Eastern traditions. For example, La Boca Caminito, a famous spot 20 minutes by car southeast of Buenos Aires, Argentina, is a place where one can most vividly encounter Argentine art. It is filled with buildings in brilliant and vivid colors, murals, sculptures, outdoor museums, and souvenir shops selling local products, making it a region where one can most vividly encounter Argentine history and art. Kim is very familiar with this space, often taking guests there for sightseeing. During this period, she not only assembled discarded wood but also fused genres. In terms of content, she freely connected experiences and imagined scenes from childhood with religious symbolic signs, natural elements such as leaves and flowers, dots and lines, patterns from animals or those found in indigenous crafts, and Argentine culture and art to create works with an independent atmosphere.

Thus, while Kim’s works sometimes reflect Korean elements and sometimes Argentine ones, she does not limit herself to any specific region. She believes art should be cosmic. The shamanic elements she experienced in childhood, the biblical elements of Christian faith, and the South American culture she encountered while staying in Argentina each have distinct identities, but Kim embraced all these elements as part of her life and incorporated them into her work. Therefore, there is no need to view her works specifically within the context of any particular cultural sphere. She implemented completely new art by comprehensively accepting elements acquired from the nature and culture of places where she lived.

IV. Conclusion: “Add Two Add One, Divide Two Divide One” of Life and Art

Since first using the title “Add Two Add One” around 1977, Kim has continuously used the title “Add Two Add One, Divide Two Divide One” until now. This proposition, containing the philosophical implication that all things in the universe are formed through the interaction of yin and yang, began as a concept from the creative process of cutting logs to create lines and surfaces through division (bun), then combining (hap) these again with space to complete a work. Still, it applies equally to painting work involving countless dots and lines. Dots, lines, and various color fields flow freely across the canvas without specific forms, which can be seen as shapes expressing primordial energy or vitality inherent in the artist’s inner self (which she sometimes calls “yeong” [spirit]) as waves manifested outward.

The concept “Add Two Add One, Divide Two Divide One” is not confinedto her artistic world. Although life (religion) and art may appear to be two separate realms, they were never divided throughout Kim's life. “Add Two Add One” is also a concept that encapsulates her life itself. For Kim, artistic drive cannot be understood simply as one individual’s desire for self-realization or competition. Kim’s creative drive comes from “the desire to become a being blessed by the absolute.” If her creative impulse had stemmed from worldly honor or desire for recognition, she could not have devoted herself tirelessly to creation for 40 years in Argentina, located on the opposite side of the earth. Facing her works placed before us across that long time, her confession becomes more deeply resonant: “As if conversing with the absolute every day and every moment, my sculptural language in prayer became a series called ‘Add Two Add One, Divide Two Divide One'—comprehensive adding (hap) and division (bun) that transcend time and limitation, combining not only with the work itself but with surrounding nature and the whole.” This may be the very reason why her work draws our enthusiasm and attention. Because in her will to transcend—to make life become art and art become life—she embodies the unity of duality.