KIM Whanki’s Last Work
[7-Ⅶ-74]

7-Ⅶ-74, on which Kim Whanki labored till close to the day of his surgery, became his last work. It is composed of blue-black dots in dark depths that fill most of the picture-plane, with horizontal and vertical lines dividing the space, and three circles positioned on the lines. In the late 1960s, Kim had reached a world of abstraction filled with dots, producing “all-over dot paintings,” in which he used various colors such as red and yellow in addition to mainly blue dots, creating works that were clean and vibrant with life. From 1973 to late 1974, his picture-planes were filled more with blue-gray or blue-black color dots, which left a dark, deep resonance and lingering sensations.

Kim Whanki completed 7-Ⅶ-74, an “all-over dot painting” that captured light resembling the resonance of the depths, a painting that could be called the zenith of “dot paintings” with hundreds of thousands of dots gathering to form an overall tone of light, and left his studio with feelings of relief and determination, before going to the hospital for surgery. But on July 25, 1974, at the age of 61, this artist—who had looked forward to the hope of tomorrow—returned to become one of the countless dots in the picture-planes he had filled, a star in the sky. So he passed, but his art remains by our side.

Jason Kim had joined forces to digitally express this Whanki’s artwork, using LG OLED as their canvas.

"The special thing about OLED was that it was able to express the most complex and perfect color on it." -Jason Kim-