Tschang-Yeul Kim (1929 Maengsan/Korea - 2021 Seoul/South Korea), Water Drops

oil on canvas, 55 cm x 46 cm, signed, dated 77, signed verso on stretcherframe, numbered 153

Along with Nam June Paik and Lee Ufan, Kim Tschang-Yeul is considered one of Korea's best-known contemporary artists. He has championed the arts since the beginning of his career, was inducted into the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and received an award for his cultural achievements in 2013. This is justified, considering not only his artistic work, but also the political circumstances in which he lived. This includes the then Japanese-occupied Korea - today's North Korea. After the division of the country, he was arrested as a young man and fled after ten days' imprisonment to what was then Seoul, which in turn was under US control. Kim Tschang-Yeul studied art at Seoul National University. In 1958, he founded the Modern Artists' Association and joined the Informel movement, led by Whanki Kim, a pioneering Korean abstract artist. The Rockefeller Foundation provided him with a scholarship to study at the Art Students League of New York. Kim Tschang-Yeul then moved to Paris, where he lived until his death in 2021. Kim Tschang-Yeul is celebrated worldwide for his almost meditative approach to depicting water drops. The artist uses abstraction and hyperrealism at the same time to depict the fine drops of water on the canvas and create a natural calm in his works. The artist infused his works with the Taoist principles of his upbringing, characterising water as an amorphous entity imbued with the power of dissolution and purification. The water drops on the rough canvas, set in fine painting, seem so fragile and at the same time firmly mounted, as if they could be removed from the picture support like marbles. The origin of the drops raises questions: Did they drip down from the sky onto the canvas or did they squeeze through the fibres of the surface? Likewise, one would think that such a rough surface texture would be dangerous for a natural drop of water. Each of the numerous drops depicted here is individual, just as it would be in nature. All of them are illuminated by a light source slightly elevated from the side and cast their shaped shadows in opposite directions. In the process, the strands of the canvas shine through the translucent body of water. Their fine texture could burst or even be absorbed by the porous structures, and yet all the drops of water on this painting have already withstood for decades. Kim Tschang-Yeul's works trigger a kind of meditation, and so life lessons can be drawn from their contemplation: The One familiar drop of water that sets water in motion to create a ripple. Water, as an element of nature, symbolises life itself. So too the sum of infinite water drops that make up oceans. All these parallels can be related to the water drops on the grey-brown canvas. Perhaps it is not surprising that the artist has made this very means of design his own, if one looks at his life's journey in this regard. He as an artist, as a free and creative mind, lived in a world with strong borders and political regulations. Yet the drop remains and thus gives the viewer not only joy at the beauty of a drop of water, but even hope and confidence in a better world.