With a career spanning over 40 years, Kim Yong-Ik’s practice has focused on deconstructing the visual tropes of modernism, primarily through the medium of painting. This work is emblematic of Kim’s continued fascination with the polka dot, a pattern the artist has incorporated in his work since the 1990s. A former student of the celebrated Dansaekhwa artist Park Seo-Bo, Kim Yong-Ik’s fixation on the dot can be linked to his instructor’s fondness for seriality in composition. However, unlike the organic vocabulary employed in Dansaekhwa, the shapes in Kim’s paintings have a precision that differentiates them, they are more industrial and cerebral. In direct contrast to this reference to modernism, however, Kim intentionally allows his canvases to become soiled over time, an embrace of entropy that directly alludes to their being in a constant state of change. It is this openness to imperfections juxtaposed with the meticulously painted dots that charges the artist’s work with a subtle but powerful critique—denying them a finished, canonical position.

40 HO