Kim Tschang-Yeul: Drops and Strokes: Musee Cernuschi

Kim Tschang-Yeul (1929-2021) was for many decades one of the few Korean painters who gained international celebrity and recognition. Alongside other visual artists of his generation, he contributed, after the Korean War (1950-1953), to the effervescence of the artistic scene and to the introduction in his homeland of abstract expressions in line with the principal trends of Western Art.

Encouraged by Kim Whanki (1913-1974), another great figure in Korean art, he carried on with his career and training in New York between 1965 and 1969. It was nevertheless in Paris, where he settled after his American stay and remained until returning to Korea in 2013, that he developed the vocabulary for which he is known today all over the world: the trompe-l’oeil representation of waterdrops.

If this element, by virtue of its omnipresence, has captured the public’s attention, it is often accompanied by the more or less discreet presence of Chinese characters in the background of each work. This exhibition is devoted to this latter motif and its significance in the work of Kim Tschang-Yeul. These writings remind one of the possible twofold interpretation of creations rooted both in the developments of a partly globalized art and in an Asian culture.