Kim Tschang-Yeul

Kim Tschang-Yeul (1929–2021) is an internationally acclaimed painter who spent most of his career in St. Germain, Paris. Born in Maengsan, in what is now North Korea, Kim lived amid the turmoil of Japanese colonial rule and the Korean War, ultimately fleeing south under the threat of communist persecution and leaving his family behind. After studying painting at Seoul National University’s College of Fine Arts, Kim co-founded Hyundae Fine Artists Association, which would later become the Actuel group in 1962. Kim’s early paintings were visceral abstractions in the Art Informel style, shaped by the trauma and violence he had witnessed during the war years.

In 1965, Kim relocated to New York to further develop his artistry. Confronted with deep isolation in the New York art scene, however, he undertook a radical stylistic shift, eschewing thick layers of paint in favor of a flat surface, painting biomorphic compositions that bordered on the psychedelic. In 1969, Kim moved to Paris, where he discovered the water droplet motif that would define his signature oeuvre. Drawing on the Pop Art and Minimalism he encountered in New York, he began composing globular, viscous forms that appear to ooze out through the canvas. The following year, Kim unveiled Événement de la nuit (1970)—which depicts a single, magnified drop of water—at his first exhibition in Paris at Salon de Mai. From the early 1970s until his passing in 2021, Kim devoted himself to the water droplet as an optical device: a means of reconciling the dichotomy between nature and contemporary culture. As Kim explained in 2019, “The act of painting water drops is to dissolve all things within [these], to return to a transparent state of ‘nothingness.’ By returning anger, anxiety, fear, and everything else to ‘emptiness,’ we experience peace and contentment. While some seek the enhancement of ‘ego,’ I aim toward the extinction of the ego and look for the method of expressing it.”

In 1996, Kim was bestowed with the French Order of Arts and Letters, followed by the National Order of Cultural Merits of Korea in 2012, and received a second Order of Arts and Letters from France in 2017. The artist has participated in major international group exhibitions such as Korean Contemporary Painting Exhibition, Paris (1971); Salon de Mai, Paris (1972-76); Korea: Facet of Contemporary Art, Tokyo Central Museum (1977); Korean Drawing Now, The Brooklyn Museum, New York (1981); and Water, Boghossian Foundation, Brussels (2023). Kim’s significant retrospectives were held at the Gwangju Museum of Art, Korea (2014); National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung (2012); National Museum of China, Beijing (2005); and Jeu de Paume National Gallery, Paris (2004). In August 2025, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea will present a retrospective of Kim’s career.

Kim’s works can be found among the collections of numerous institutions including the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea; Leeum Museum of Art, Korea; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art; National Museum of Modern Art, Japan; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The Kim Tschang-Yeul Museum, dedicated to collecting, researching, and exhibiting the artist’s works, was founded in 2016 in Jeju, Korea.