Woon Gallery Kim Hwan-ki Drawing Exhibition Until Next Month 13

Gallery Ung Kim Whanki Drawing Exhibition Exhibition View [Photo by Gallery Ung]

[Asia Economy Reporter Byunghee Park] Woong Gallery (GALLERY WOONG) is presenting an exhibition of drawings by Kim Whanki, a pioneer of modern Korean abstract art, until the 13th of next month.

Kim Whanki's artistic world can be broadly divided into three periods: the 1950s including the Paris and Seoul periods, the Paris period from 1956 to 1959, and the New York period from 1963 until his passing in 1974.

This exhibition features 22 restrained drawings composed of dots, lines, and planes on paper from the 1950s and late 1960s, along with 4 original works representing each period of Kim Whanki's artistic career.

In November last year, at Christie's Hong Kong auction, Kim Whanki's only series, "Universe (1971)," was sold for 13.2 billion KRW, the highest price ever achieved in Korean art auctions. Consequently, the art community is re-examining Kim Whanki's artistic world, which greatly influenced Korean modernism, from various perspectives and approaches. Woong Gallery has also planned this drawing exhibition to showcase Kim Whanki's creative process and fundamental concepts.

In the past, drawings were narrowly understood as a process to record ideas or simply study what the artist intended to express before completing a work. However, recently, sketches themselves have become a means for artists to express their artistic world and are regarded as an appropriate medium for artists to freely and easily convey more than just preliminary ideas, leading to a renewed recognition of their importance.

Woong Gallery hopes that through this exhibition, visitors will appreciate Kim Whanki's creative process, who always strived to express Eastern beauty through dots, lines, planes, and restrained colors, and gain a deeper understanding of his artistic world that captures communication with nature on canvas.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.