In the fall of 1963, the painter Kim Whanki was 50 years old, and his career was ascendent. Already a deeply respected figure in his native South Korea, he was regularly exhibiting his serene and spare pictures of landscapes and interiors in Seoul, and a few years earlier, he had been named president of the influential Hongik Art College there. At the São Paulo Biennial, he had just received an honorable mention. Then he made a very risky decision: He would head from Brazil straight to New York, the center of the art world at the time. He explained his thinking in his diary that November, shortly after arriving: “let’s go and fight.”
The week that Kim wrote those words, the number one song in the United States was “Sugar Shack,” by Jimmy Gilmer and the Fireballs; the Museum of Modern Art was hosting a show by the pioneering Abstract Expressionist painter and teacher Hans Hofmann; and Robert Rauschenberg, about a dozen years younger than Kim, was presenting his latest works at dealer Leo Castelli’s gallery on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Kim settled across Central Park, in a studio building on West 73rd Street, not far from where the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts was under construction. A grant from the Rockefeller Foundation helped pay his bills.
Kim was used to being far from home—he studied in Tokyo in the 1930s, like many of his compatriots, and spent a few years in Paris in the late 1950s—and he connected with other Koreans in New York, but it still must have been difficult to be away. Nevertheless, he got to work, joined by his wife, Kim Hyang-an. “For now, I want to create meticulous paintings rather than producing many,” he wrote. Over the ensuing decade, Kim made artworks of formidable invention and beauty, steadily developing a luminous form of abstraction that makes a strong case for him as one of the 20th century’s greatest artists.
Parallel exhibitions in New York right now—“We Meet Again in New York” at the LG OLED Lounge at Frieze New York and “Whanki in New York” at the newly remodeled Korean Cultural Center New York (KCCNY)—offer a rare chance to grapple with Kim’s accomplishments. Astonishingly, these are the first presentations of his work in the city in the half-century since his death in July 1974 of a brain hemorrhage, following spinal surgery, at the age of only 61.
In Korea today, leading institutions and collectors chase and preserve Kim’s work. The Whanki Museum, which Kim Hyang-an opened in northern Seoul in 1992 to honor his legacy, is a beloved site—and an inspiration for other single-artist museums that have been established in the country since then. Last year, he was the subject of a moving retrospective at the Hoam Museum of Art in Yongin, just south of the capital. But in his adopted hometown of New York, he remains disturbingly obscure. No museum owns his art, though the Metropolitan Museum of Art, at least, has on loan right now an elegant and restrained still life of a spherical white moon jar, the classic Joseon Dynasty-era ceramic that he collected. It is time for institutions to catch up.
The lack of support for Kim’s work in his adopted hometown of New York is all the more vexing because, during his time here, he was very much in the mix, fighting for his place. In the early 1970s, his years of miracles, he had three solo exhibitions with the dealer Elinor Poindexter, who also showed work by key contemporary American painters such as Richard Diebenkorn and Jules Olitski, whose trailblazing styles have an affinity with Kim’s own sui generis approach.
In his heady early years in New York, Kim ramped up the size of his canvases while paring down his language: no easy task. The resulting compositions are radiant and enveloping, their wide expanses of color nodding to creations by Olitski, Barnett Newman (whose works Kim saw), Mark Rothko (whose studio he visited), and his friend Adolph Gottlieb, while still being entirely his own. They are candid, loose, and never forced. (His mid-1960s “Heart Series”—paintings on paper of brilliant red hearts displayed on LG OLED screens at the KCCNY exhibition, underscore the earnest and unpretentious nature of Kim’s practice.)
You can usually detect in even Kim’s most abstract works potent traces and rhythms of the world, as in Diebenkorn’s “Ocean Park” paintings (which he began in 1967). His works feel alive. In 7-VI-69 #65 (1969), which will appear at Frieze in digital form, a splintered orange-yellow circle atop blue recalls a sun hovering on the horizon of a lake or sea. It could be a view from just beneath the water, where everything above is fractured, slightly out of focus.
The almost-spiritual connection that Kim’s work has to nature is especially pronounced in his “Universe” paintings, which he built from countless minute dots, an ingenious (and laborious) process. Diluting oil paint with large amounts of turpentine, and wielding a type of thin brush typically used in Chinese calligraphy, he was able to leave marks that bring to mind watercolors or traditional ink paintings. This was a sensitive medium. Each impression of his brush is ever so slightly different, recording his touch—the pressure he applied, his movement, and even his breath. Viewing these paintings, you are right there with him.
Kim’s method in his “Universe” paintings is an exemplary case of an artist distilling his practice down to its most essential components, self-imposed constraints yielding unexpected, virtuoso effects. These pictures are paragons of restraint. Most are just a single color (blue, most famously), but in a vast array of shades. Arraying blue dots in concentric circles or undulating lines, never precise grids, he conjured twilit skies, rolling waves, and even cosmic energies. You can detect the presence of powerful, unseen forces. (Alma Thomas, working down in Washington, D.C., at the same time, was honing a similar technique, but her marks are more delineated, and she preferred explosive, ebullient color. Agnes Martin was another kindred spirit in her devotion to a bracing and absolute concision, an economy of means.)
“By organizing pictoral space as an accumulation of very small units,” the scholar Joan Kee has argued, “Kim rescales the painting so that it feels intimate, even personal, to the individual viewer.” These are paintings that can engulf you, and ones that reward close looking, lending themselves to high-resolution close-ups on a glowing screen—an experience, I suspect, that will awe both Kim fans and Kim newcomers, providing them with an entirely new understanding of the master’s paintings while whetting their appetites to see them in the flesh. (A visit to the Whanki Museum is in order. But for now, the presentations at Frieze New York and KCCNY provide an opportunity for all comers to experience the wonders of Kim’s works through an LG OLED screen, a digital canvas which convey his original colors with the highest accuracy, as he applied them.)
The “Universe” paintings—like the red sunburst that is 14-III-72 #223 (1972), at LG’s Frieze booth—are gifts of visual splendor, but for Kim, they also had a deep personal resonance. At one point in his diary, he wrote, that, while thinking of “my family and friends who were left in Korea, I put a dot.” Conceived stroke by stroke, these artworks mark the passing of time. In their meditative repetition, they suggest someone attempting to anchor, or find, their place in the world—as well as in a larger, universal sense. They invite their viewers to try to do the same.
Kim was far from the only foreign-born member of the New York art world at the time, of course. Migration and exile are central to the story of avant-garde art in America. There is Willem de Kooning landing in 1926, a stowaway from the Netherlands, and Rothko (born Markus Yakovlevich Rothkowitz), coming from a part of the Russian Empire that is now Latvia, in 1913, with his family. As World War II consumed Europe in the 1930s, one artist after another sought refuge in the city: Max Ernst, Marc Chagall, and Marcel Duchamp from France, Hedda Sterne from Romania, Hofmann from Germany.
Without its émigrés, New York, its art world, and art history itself would be much, much poorer. Kim managed to come at a moment when travel from South Korea was immensely difficult—passports were tough to obtain under a repressive administration. Today he is buried with his wife in Kenisco Cemetery in Valhalla, a suburban New York town about 30 miles north of Manhattan. Han Yongjin, who showed alongside Kim in São Paulo, and who also settled in New York, designed his tombstone. The composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, who decamped to New York after the Russian Revolution, is buried nearby.
New York was lucky to have Kim Whanki, and even more lucky to have him in his prime. His early passing elicits painful questions about what could have been and where his spellbinding, category-eluding art would have gone next. No matter. He came to New York to fight. Not everyone knows it yet, but he won.
— Andrew Russeth, New York, April 2024 —
