KIM, Young-Hun - Meta River

Press release

Galerie Richard presents the second solo exhibition of Korean artist Kim Young-Hun entitled Meta River in Paris from March 11 to April 28, 2023. All the paintings of the exhibition were made at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris in 2022 and 2023.

During his childhood he seems to develop a fascination for the black and white images of television. The controlled tremors of his brush strokes, the breaks of rhythms, distortions, refer to these interferences of screens.

The artist is inspired by a traditional technique of painting Corénne in the name of Hyukpil which consists in the use of a single layer of oil paint with a wide brush covered with several colors, and this in a single continuous gesture. Each tremor of the hand becomes a definitive trace. These modulatory lines can also suggest movements of nature, such as cloud formations or water barrels, conscious and unconscious references to classic Korean landscape paintings. For this reason his paintings can also inspire quiet and meditative contemplation.

He begins his paintings by representing delimited, geometric forms that resemble the «initial conditions» to use the terms of the chaos theory, as they will determine the shapes of the large brushstrokes. In these new works he increases the presence of these forms and works a lot on the content giving them a great richness in the details. These multicolored spaces are crossed by thin curved lines that add their specific dynamics.

Kim Young-Hun applies ancestral techniques of Korean painting to represent abstract images inspired by disturbances of digital screens. By using both the painter’s classic colour palette and the hyper-saturated digital screens, he brings a testimony of the mental and visual universe of a generation passed from an analog to digital world..

The digital revolution is the defining event of this generation of artists and Kim Young-Hun visually translates it into the history of painting.

Kim Young-Hun (born 1964 in Nonsan, South Korea) lives and works in New York and Seoul.
He is a graduate of Chelsea College of Art and Design and Goldsmiths College in London.
He has exhibited in Europe, Asia and the United States with more than sixty group exhibitions and more than fifteen solo exhibitions. His paintings are in the collections of Art Bank-National Contemporary Art Museum, Seoul, Government Art Bank-National Contemporary Art Museum, Seoul, Bank of America, New York, The Arts Club, London, ZAHA Museum, Seoul, Sung-kok Art Museum, Seoul, Samsung Museum of Art Leeum, Seoul, Kolon Group, Seoul, KOEX Kimchi Museum, Seoul.