Kim Tschang-Yeul first began painting water drops in the early 1970s, after he moved to Paris from New York. For the artist, a practicing Taoist, water drops embody the Eastern philosophical idea of “full emptiness”, and reflect the human condition of being at once wonderful and ordinary, vulnerable and adaptable. By suspending time and gravity, Kim asks viewers to celebrate the briefness of water, as well as their own mortality. Kim began painting the Recurrence series in 1989, which features drops of water seemingly suspended on surfaces covered in Chinese characters. This series recalls Kim’s childhood devotion to calligraphy, and his memories of practicing characters from the popular children’s instructional manual, the Thousand Character Classic, onto newspapers until the whole sheet was covered with ink. The presence of this text in his mature work lends the series a deeply personal dimension, connecting one of his earliest encounters with writing to his signature motif.

This 2000 painting demonstrates the richly layered and textured surfaces of the Recurrence series. Chinese characters appear stenciled against washes of paint of varying opacity, while luminous waterdrops hover above, partially obscuring the lettering beneath. This interplay of visibility and concealment evokes the tension between presence and absence, as language shifts between legibility and abstraction.