Kim Chong Hak, Painter of Seoraksan

Pandemonium, Kim’s largest painting to date, is supercharged with energy. Spread out over four panels, its churning spring blossoms act like gears rotating at different speeds across its surface. Its flowers, based on embroidered blossoms in Kim’s folk art collection, are transformed from miniature to larger than life, delicate to coarse, demure to overpowering. The mural-size painting’s chaotic incarnation of its title represents an ecstatic leap into the abyss that Kim endeavored to express through abstraction early in his career.

Pandemonium, 2018
Acrylic on canvas
Courtesy of the artist and the Kim Chong Hak Foundation

Kim’s Fall (1980) features an annular solar eclipse in which a fiery moon is ringed by the sun’s bright disk behind it. Made in the wake of the May 1980 Gwangju Uprising, a series of student demonstrations in response to military dictator Chun Doo-hwan’s declaration of martial law, the work’s blood red sky evokes the massacre of hundreds by the military during the uprising.

Fall, 1980
Watercolor on hanji paper
Courtesy of the artist and the Kim Chong Hak Foundation

In 2015, Kim moved his studio from Sokcho to Busan. Distant from Seoraksan’s biodiversity but introduced to a new oceanside climate, Kim maintained a daily practice of drawing botanical specimens with watercolor, summoning his skill as a calligrapher and ink wash painter. The studies of Korea’s wildflowers and grasses, drawn on cream-colored mulberry paper called hanji (literally “Korean paper”), show his careful attention to the forms, structures, and colors of nature.

Botanical Study, 2022
Watercolor on hanji paper
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, promised gift of the artist
Courtesy of the artist and the Kim Chong Hak Foundation

Initially an avid collector of woodenware and scholar furniture, Kim became fascinated by folk art and craft traditions, especially Korean folk embroidery (minsu). He reveled in the sense of modernity and artistic freedom in the ornamentation of everyday objects such as wrapping cloths (bojagi), pillow ends, and pincushions. Their expressive, informal needlework—as if the makers had painted, rather than sewn, with their needle and thread—inspired him, and he frequently borrowed their color combinations and auspicious imagery, especially flowers. Kim knew being branded as a painter of flowers held a belittling connotation of women’s work. As an act of rebellion against the aesthetics of male-centric abstraction in a male-dominated art world, Kim makes work that actively evokes the labor of women in Korean folk traditions.

Artists once known, Korea
Pillows, undated
Wood, cotton, and embroidered fabric
Courtesy of the artist and the Kim Chong Hak Foundation