Kim Tschang-Yeul at Tina Kim Gallery: What to Know
Tina Kim Gallery presents “Kim Tschang-Yeul: Recurrence,” its third solo exhibition of the Korean émigré painter, who devoted five decades of his career to the sustained exploration of luminous, hyperrealistic waterdrops. Focusing on works from the 1980s through the 2010s, the exhibition traces the evolution of Kim’s mature practice as he embraced a more tactile materiality, experimented with varied surfaces and grounds, and began working on a larger scale. The show is on view through December 19, 2026.
At its center is his Recurrence series, which emerged in the mid-1980s, shown alongside significant Waterdrop paintings from across these decades. Together, the works demonstrate the range Kim drew from a single motif, continually pushing its formal and conceptual possibilities.
The waterdrop motif emerged from a chance encounter with the material itself. While working in a makeshift studio outside Paris, Kim splashed water onto the back of his canvases. When the droplets caught the light, he was struck by their appearance and began searching for a way to capture their fleeting presence through painting. For Kim, the repeated depiction was never simply an exercise in illusionism: it became a means of working through the memories of violence and loss he carried from the Korean War. “The act of painting waterdrops is to dissolve everything into an act of transparency, returning to nothingness,” he wrote in a letter to the critic Lee Yil. This conception of painting as repetition, purification and ego-erasure was also informed by Kim’s engagement with Taoist and Zen Buddhist thought.
Born in 1929 in the north of the then-unified Korea, Kim migrated to the south, later left for New York and settled in Paris in 1969. His contribution to postwar painting was recently celebrated in a retrospective at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA), in Seoul in 2025, and his work is held in collections including M+, Hong Kong; Centre Pompidou, Paris; MMCA; Leeum Museum of Art, Korea; and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. The Kim Tschang-Yeul Museum, dedicated to his work, was founded in 2016 in Jeju, Korea, and in May 2026 his former home and studio in Seoul’s Pyeongchang-dong neighborhood reopened to the public as the Kim Tschang-Yeul Atelier.
Tina Kim Gallery is at 525 West 21st Street in Chelsea, open Tuesday through Saturday, 10 AM to 6 PM. Admission is free.
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Sources
- Tina Kim Gallery, exhibition page and press release: dates, works, the Recurrence series, the origin of the waterdrop motif and exhibition history.
- Tina Kim Gallery, contact page: address (525 West 21st Street) and gallery hours.
- Almine Rech, artist page: biography (born 1929 in the north of the then-unified Korea; settled in Paris in 1969).
