Born in 1929 in Maengsan in what is now North Korea, Kim Tschang-Yeul spent his childhood amid the turmoil of the Korean War and postcolonial liberation. He later fled to South Korea as the North saw a dramatic rise in Communist influence. After studying painting at the Seoul National University, Kim established the Modern Artists’ Association—later renamed as Actuel—in 1958. He joined Korea’s Art Informel movement that same year along with a group of avant-garde artists, including renowned Dansaekhwa masters Park Seo-Bo and Chung Sang-Hwa. As one of the first generations of Korean modernist painters, Kim participated in the Paris Biennale in 1961 and the São Paulo Biennale in 1965. These exhibitions opened the door for the artist to embark on his artistic career abroad, which would span more than 40 years.

When Kim Tschang-Yeul moved to New York in 1965, Pop Art prevailed as the artistic lifeblood of the city. Following a recommendation by his teacher, Kim Whanki, Kim received a scholarship from the Rockefeller Foundation to study at the Art Students League of New York. During this time, Kim became acquainted with the artist Nam June Paik who later supported Kim’s participation in the New York Avant Garde Festival in 1969. It was in New York that Kim began his earliest experiments into painting the bulbous abstract forms that would later lead to his signature style. It was during this time that the artist began experimenting with visceral abstraction, depicting colorful spherical forms which the artist aptly called “paintings of the intestines.”

In 1968, Kim relocated to Paris and began his artistic career anew, traveling between France and South Korea and forming a bridge between Europe and his native land. Hosting fellow artists like Lee Ufan, Park Seo-Bo, and Chung Sang-Hwa in his St. Germain studio, Kim became a figure of global success to painters back home. Drawing from the Pop Art and Minimalism he encountered in New York, Kim continued his study of pure abstraction until 1969, at which point he began producing globular, viscous forms that appear to ooze out through the canvas. These shapes foreshadow the illusionistic waterdrop motif that Kim would paint from the early 1970s until his death in 2021.