Traumatized by the Korean War in which he participated, he had made his unique artistic motif an intimate therapeutic exercise and the universal symbol of human suffering. He died on January 5, at the age of 91.
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Korean painter Kim Tschang-yeul is dead , Tuesday January 5, at the age of 91, in Koryo Hospital in Seoul. Often nicknamed the “painter of the drop of water”, he made this shape a universal symbol.
He was born on December 24, 1929 in Maengsan, in today’s North Korean province of Pyongan , then under Japanese occupation. In 1946, to escape the Soviet occupation which followed the Japanese invasion, he clandestinely crossed the demarcation line to reach the southern zone. He attended the Fine Arts Department of Seoul University and libraries where he discovered Western literature. But when the northern troops broke through the front and reached Seoul on June 25, 1950, he was captured and forcibly enlisted with other students. After weeks of horrors, a bombardment allowed him to escape with a few comrades and swim across the Han River to join the Allied lines. However, he is not done with the war. Until the suspension of the fighting, on July 27, 1953, he took part against the Communists, in particular on Jeju Island.
Having finally resumed his training, he joined the international movement of gestural abstractions , informal and materialist which then dominated as much in Asia as in Europe and the United States. His paintings were presented at the Paris Biennale in 1961 and then at the Sao Paulo Biennale in 1965. That same year, he received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, which allowed him to leave Korea for the first time. It goes first through London and the Tate Gallery. In 2004, he told of his visit: “On one side of the door there was a Rothko, and on the other, a Bacon. For the first time I saw works, and no longer reproductions in books and magazines. Bacon left me stunned. “
The New York experience leaves him with bitter memories. Although he attended the Art Students League from 1966 to 1968, he quickly felt uncomfortable. Not speaking English, having very little money to live, he struggles to adapt to the opulent consumer society, he who comes from a country that the war has impoverished. He subsists thanks to food work, drawing ties, producing stained glass in Plexiglas. His encounter with pop art is violent. “I was lost, he said. It was the boom in pop, Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg and thousands of bad artists who imitated them. This blockbuster disgusted me. And Warhol … marketing, promotion, nothing else… “He then has only one source, his compatriot the performer and videographer Nam June Paik. It was with his help that he managed to leave New York for Paris in 1970. He thus finally followed the advice of his Korean teachers, who told him that “to become an artist, it was necessary to learn French and come to Paris “.
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