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, he joined Korea’s Art Informel movement 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 that 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 bright, oozing, biomorphic forms—singular bodies that were at once fluid and fractured. Although the forms resemble microscopic biological units, they are painted in vibrant and synthetic hues, perhaps emblematic of an interest in the commercial and artificial that Kim shared with the artist milieu of New York during this time. The fluidity of his forms also anticipates Kim’s later fixation with the subject of the water drop, which he would paint exclusively from the early 1970s until his passing in 2021.