Byungki Kim

Kim Byungki (1916-2022), who has been painting ever since the 1930s, is a veteran artist who has left significant footprints in the history of Korean modern and contemporary art, through his experiments with contemporary form in Korea and abroad. Kim began studying abstraction after his encounter with abstract painting and surrealist art during his education in Japan; he discovered calligraphic formative beauty in the styles of Informel in the 1950s. He thereafter created a new and unique formative language of his own. Unlike the abstract painting of the West, emphasizing materiality, Kim Byungki has stressed narrative elements. His interest in the narrative later led him toward figurative painting, which began to show in his work from the 1970s. Some of the common formative characteristics in his works, traversing abstract and figurative, are their dynamic brush strokes and straight lines resembling traditional ink paintings. The straight lines symbolize the urban landscape, portraying the image of Korea resulting from rapid economic growth through the city skyline thickly filled with high-rise buildings. Other works, on the other hand, show moderately curved lines, which are believed to symbolize the roof tiles of traditional houses and the ridges of mountains. Similar to the dichotomous structure of abstract and figurative, the city and nature also are contrasting concepts. Kim Byungki has strived to break down the boundaries of such differences. That is to say, he does not intend to portray harmony through contrast, but to capture the tight tension of the contrast in his picture-planes. 1930