Kim Yong-Ik

Influenced by Dansaekhwa, the Korean monochrome painting, and the Japanese Mono-ha movement, Kim Yong-Ik established his career in the late 1970s with his Plane Object paintings, a series of airbrush paintings on unstretched canvases that relate to these traditions. In the 1980s, having completed a thesis on Marcel Duchamp, Kim moved from the ‘Plane Object’ series to more abstract and geometric languages. During the 1980s and 1990s, he developed increasingly experimental work by using scraps and thus including forces greater than his own imprint, such as stains, hair or dust. By the early 1990s, Kim develops his “polka dot” series consisting of paintings depicting simple and serialized arrangements of circles. In 1999, Kim helped establish one of Korea’s leading exhibition spaces known as “art space pool.”