Kim Tschang-Yeul

The canvas is empty except for a single drop of water, its shadow so exact that touching it should leave your hand wet. Kim Tschang-Yeul painted this one thing for fifty years. It is said to have begun in Paris in the early 1970s, with droplets on the back of a canvas. He rendered the drops photographically on raw hemp and hanji and left the ground bare; from the 1980s he laid them over characters from the Thousand Character Classic. He often described the drop as a way of washing away memories of the Korean War — erasing and preserving inside the same stroke. He died in 2021.