Transitions（SINGAPORE）

Solo Exhibition by Kim Tae-Ho (KR)

 

Mizuma Gallery is pleased to announce Transitions, a solo exhibition by South Korean artist, Kim Tae-Ho.

 

Kim Tae-Ho, one of the leading artists of Korean monochrome art since the 1970s, is highly celebrated for having expanded the possibilities of his art form within the East Asian contemporary practice. His bold experimentation across media, sometimes incorporating traditional handmade hanji paper within his heavily textured, monochromatic works, has strongly allied his practice with the legacy of his contemporary Dansaekhwa painters. Kim Tae-Ho’s paintings retain the unique characteristic of their vivid palette: a product of the artist’s meticulous working method to accrue a dense sediment of colour within the picture plane itself.

 

The exhibition will see the progression of Kim’s career with the first of his series Form, up till his most recent, Internal Rhythm. Dating back to 1977 when Form was first presented, the paintings attempted to express an abstract figurative subject buried within geometric and illusionary forms. With hanji paper later incorporated, Form took inspiration from building shutters that stand strong as a symbol for resistance; Kim sought to express this significance of miscommunication and isolation of people in contemporary times. Moving forward into the 1990s, Internal Rhythm was birthed, shifting his portrayal of expressions from form to space structure.

 

From 1995 onward, Internal Rhythm sees Kim through a painfully laborious and meticulous art-making process. Guided by interwoven lines drawn in a fixed rhythm on the canvas, heavy brushstrokes are layered over twenty times to produce a bulky mass of paint layers. He proceeds to then scrape away the dense accumulation of paint, to reveal the colours beneath each layer. Countless visual spaces are constructed within the overlapping grid formation: each cell like a beehive, producing its own life in the realm of the painting. Art critic Kim Bok-young has referred to Kim’s method of working as a ‘coexistence of concealing and revealing’. He does not reveal all at once, but prefers to show only a small part of himself: a small moment of conflict within the internal rhythm of the artist.

 

Transitions will be Kim Tae-Ho’s first solo exhibition in Singapore following his four-decade long career.

 

 

About the Artist

 

Kim Tae-Ho (b. 1948, Busan, South Korea) attained a B.F.A. in Painting from the Graduate School of Fine Arts in Hongik University, Seoul, Korea. His major solo exhibitions include Gallery Hyundai, Seoul, Korea (1985 and 1991), Kamakura Gallery, Tokyo, Japan (1996), Tokyo Gallery, Tokyo, Japan (2002), Sung Kok Museum, Seoul, Korea (2007), and most recently Operating Space Structure, Busan Museum of Art, Busan, Korea (2015). He has participated extensively in group exhibitions both in Korea and abroad, such as China, Japan, the Philippines, Costa Rica, Switzerland, Germany, the U.S. Amongst the many awards received, the year 2003 saw Tae-Ho’s attainment of the Grand Prize at the 2nd Buil Art Competition, Busan, Korea, and in 1982, he received the Grand Prize at Gonggan Printmaking Competition. His works are in the collection of The British Museum (London, UK), National Museum of Contemporary Art (Seoul, South Korea), Busan Municipal Museum of Art (Busan, South Korea), and Shimonoseki Museum (Shimonoseki, Japan) amongst others. Since 1987, Tae-Ho has been a Professor at the Department of Painting in Hongik University. Kim Tae-Ho lives and works in Seoul, Korea.