Kim Tschang-yeul’s Water Drop Survey at MMCA Explores Conflict Traumas

Kim Tschang-yeul at all times approached artwork as a instrument for lifelong existential and philosophical inquiry—one which sought to heal each particular person and collective traumas and distill a brand new type of expression able to capturing the common flux of all issues. As his 60-year apply unfolds interval by interval within the artist’s profession survey presently at MMCA Seoul, a type of private phenology takes form, with the struggling and scars of his beginnings progressively reworking into clear, pure, but inherently fragile and unstable drops—crystallized illusions of eternalized perfection.

For Kim, the water droplet—a recurring motif that grew to become his signature—at all times transcended any mere materials or idealized depiction. It grew to become as an alternative a potent allegorical vessel for emotional and religious exploration, resonating deeply with East Asian philosophical traditions and the historic currents of South Korea itself.

Kim’s journey started in Maengsan, in what’s now North Korea, which he left at sixteen because the peninsula fractured underneath the violence of liberation, division and conflict. This uprooting, and the battle that adopted, instilled in him an early consciousness of rupture, survival and the precarity of existence. The turbulence of the Korean Conflict, his interrupted research at Seoul Nationwide College, and his navy service on Jeju Island grew to become the uncooked emotional and human substrate from which his artwork emerged—work cast within the stress between reminiscence and erasure, flesh and spirit, transiency and transcendence, and at all times marked by a deep consciousness of the fragility of each human second and sensation.

By the tip of the Fifties, Kim had developed his personal model of what may need been described as Artwork Informel in Europe, pushing portray past sterile abstraction into an area the place painterly matter might embody and course of the traces and wounds of conflict and human struggling. His early works are haunted, wounded fields—surfaces scarred like battlefields.

From these tormented surfaces, it turns into clear that portray for Kim was by no means about illustration however about exorcism and catharsis: a confrontation with grief and a ritual of each mourning and purification, which might solely proceed via the struggling of remembrance, elaboration and eventual acceptance. His writings from this era reveal a painful consciousness of the burden of existence:

“Everybody appears so smart, however why do our our bodies itch with unease? At the same time as we scrape away the flesh in pursuit of sunshine and shadow, we return empty-handed. If there may be any harvest, it’s insanity,” he wrote. “We console ourselves by calling this situation—a state neither new nor unusual—a harvest, because it springs from probably the most fundamental intuition to guage and assign what we name new worth.”

On view are the works exhibited on the São Paulo Biennial (1965), a turning level in his profession that adopted his earlier participation within the Paris Biennale (1961), as he helped pioneer the internationalization of Korean up to date artwork. Inside the dense and abyssal meanders of his early textures, Kim discovered a way to console the trauma left by dying and loss and to rediscover the facility of creative creation to examine new worlds and futures.

Then got here Paris and the brand new postwar energies of the ‘60s. One way or the other, these deep scars changed into mucosal portals. Within the exhibition’s second part, “Phenomenon,” Kim’s canvases turn out to be porous, psychedelic, psychological areas that already appear to seek for a realm past the bodily fragility and struggling of the second, tapping into various dimensions of eternity and the infinite inventive potential of the thoughts.

Whereas the exhibition doesn’t explicitly draw this connection, these works align with the visionary spirit of the last decade, when a burgeoning psychedelic tradition provided youthful generations a method to think about a brand new world after the wars—a catalyst for brand new methods of seeing actuality. Creativeness, for Kim, had already turn out to be the trail to overcoming trauma. It was throughout this era that Kim started to discover the notion of transparency as a way to problem the boundary between imaginative and prescient and creativeness. The cell-like constructions as soon as tethered to fleshy actuality gave method to a extra fluid molecular state, finally crystallizing—a minimum of momentarily—into the water droplets that may turn out to be his defining signature, starting with Occasion of Evening (1972), lengthy thought-about his first water droplet work.

Additionally on view on this part are eight beforehand unexhibited work from Kim’s New York interval introduced for the primary time in Korea. He lived within the metropolis for a number of years, inspired by artist Kim Whanki and with assist from the Rockefeller Basis.

Oftentimes, Kim’s water droplets seem in clusters, as if about to merge, evoking processes of mobile coagulation. But they continue to be liminal, singular kinds—suspended in precarious relation to 1 one other and their environment—implying the potential for motion and transformation at any second, typically erupting into shadowy water stains.

Whereas the simplicity of Kim’s work may very well be mistaken for adornment, the MMCA survey makes it clear that behind these seemingly serene compositions lies a profound existential and philosophical meditation. What we see is just not a stylistic flourish however a symbolic and archetypal illustration of the common nature of all issues.

It took Kim a lifetime to finish this technique of cleaning, purification and elaboration of trauma—reworking scars into water droplets. “I paint the Waterdrops for a very long time as a psychological sickness of obsession. Annihilation of all my desires, and pains, and anxieties. Hoping someway watchable,” seems on the wall of the ultimate room.

Even of their continuity, there may be perpetual shifting—a mutability of being, the place what we’re is continually redefined via what we really feel. His Recurrence sequence grew to become for him a method to elaborate reminiscence, taking the burden of phrases and historical past and turning them into droplets destined to fade, accepting that human existence, regardless of how dramatic, is only a drop within the ocean of a common continuum.

By 1989, Kim had begun incorporating textual content and conventional characters into his works. These compositions, dense with layered meanings and semantic interference, exist in a state of stress between the obvious stability and permanence of austere characters and the flux of liquid drops. This sequence deepens his exploration of the dialectic between permanence and transience: textual content because the structure of civilization, the codex of historical past, the custodian of reminiscence that outlives the person. Water, conversely, is amnesiac, everlasting, cyclical.

In these works, the artist pits permanence towards dissolution, inviting viewers to replicate on the fragility of human programs of that means. Historical past, language and reminiscence all finally evaporate. Solely the pure order stays, in its perpetual cycles of matter, forces and recollections. Featured within the gallery is Recurrence SNM93001 (1991), a powerful 7.8-meter-wide portray from the MMCA assortment proven for the primary time, radiating a luminous, nearly auratic presence. Accompanying it’s a sculpture that embodies and manifests this stress between the burden of bodily existence and the delicate purity of common forces already encapsulated within the suspended area of a water drop.

The ultimate part of the present, “Recurrence,” probes the supply of Kim’s creative creation via the interaction of language and picture in his Thousand Character Traditional portray. “Between two pages, Waterdrops is a comma—poetry sipping eternity,” wrote Alain Bosquet in Twenty Drops of Water, a poem for Kim Tschang-yeul. One of many final work within the exhibition reveals the drop already remodeled, now extra like a flame, submerged in a smoky, red-tinged environment. The perfection of eternity, as soon as liquefied in a single drop, has already evaporated, returning to the cycle. For Kim, the method of catharsis appears full. There’s a palpable acceptance of actuality as an inescapable circle of beginning, transformation, destruction, therapeutic and rebirth—one thing his apply not solely embraced but in addition translated right into a powerfully human-readable, common, symbolic and poetic kind.

“Kim Tschang-yeul” is at Korea’s Nationwide Museum of Trendy and Modern Artwork in Seoul via December 21, 2025.

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