Kim Kulim

Kim Kulim (, also frequently romanized as Kim Ku-lim; born 1936 in Sangju, North Gyeongsang province, Korea) is a South Korean artist. Primarily self-taught, Kim Kulim's artistic practice has been shaped by his involvement in Seoul's experimental art scene in the late 1960s and early 1970s, his exposure to Japan's art scene in the mid-1970s, and his decades in the United States (where he lived from 1984 to 2000). Never limiting himself to abiding by artistic conventions, Kim has repeatedly transgressed boundaries, in ways that the art critic Oh Kwang-su has described as extending an experimental spirit into his present-day artistic practice.

In his early work, Kim quickly departed from the conventions of painting by incorporating industrial materials and performing destructive acts such as burning his artwork. Beginning in 1969, his pursuit of happenings led him to multiple "firsts" — Korea's first works of mail art and land art, as well as a harbinger of experimental film. Concurrently, Kim was a founding member of two artist groups, AG (short for the Korean Avant-Garde Art Association, active 1969–1974; the first artist group to explore the role of the avant-garde in Korea) and the notorious The Fourth Group. With later decades spent abroad, his practice became transnationally shaped while also centering concepts of Eastern thought, namely, Yin and Yang.

As the critic Oh observed, across his artistic career, Kim has progressively expanded his practice to span a wide array of media and activities — and yet, Kim has never been concerned with the confines of artistic genres.

Biography Following his childhood in the central area of the Korean peninsula, Kim Kulim enrolled in a nearby art college in North Gyeongsang province. In the midst of his first year, he dropped out because the school's reinforcement of an academic canon, centered upon French modern masters such as Matisse and Cézanne, disinterested him. Instead, Kim wanted to study more contemporaneous artists; he turned to the pages of Life and Time magazines (brought to the Korean peninsula by the U.S. military), where he first learned about Jackson Pollack and Pierre Soulages. In 1969, he became a founding member the group AG; in 1970, he joined other intellectuals—artists and performers, as well as those interested in religion, politics, theatre, music and society, each of whom were discontent with institutional conventions and shared the belief that art should make a greater impact upon life—to establish The Fourth Group. It was ultimately completed in 2016.

Kim's second film project, The Meaning of 1/24 of a Second (1969), involved the artist Chung Chan-seung as an actor and has been heralded as Korea's first avant-garde film. Kim staged a third From Phenomenon to Traces work (recognized as Korea's first work of land art) on April 11, 1970, on the banks of the Han River. There, Kim demarcated five triangles, spanning 100 meters in total, on the grassy bank. He then doused the areas in gasoline and set them on fire, one by one. Months later, the grass on the bank grew once again, eventually erasing all traces of this artwork. Mounted outside of conventional spaces for making and exhibiting art, the work inserted art into a space that belonged to both the public and nature, and it allowed the environment to take part in the creative act. As the critic Oh Kwang-su later reflected, this work demonstrated Kim's interest in how time becomes embedded and realized within an artwork, from the work's conception to its destruction.

For information on Kim Kulim's projects with The Fourth Group during these years, see The Fourth Group.

Years in Japan, 1973–1975 After The Fourth Group disbanded under duress from governmental investigations, Kim left South Korea for Japan's art scene. There, Kim made artworks that explored intersections such as performance and video, and possibilities such as turning everyday objects into sculpture. His video work Wiping Cloth (1974) activated the ability of video editing to compress an extensive process into just a few minutes. Wiping Cloth shows a person endlessly wiping a dirty table with a cloth, until the cloth itself is completely soiled, then worn and tattered, and, finally, disintegrates on the table, making the table dirty once again. For several artworks, Kim employed everyday objects in ways that stripped them of their utilitarian value. He began with the simple action of installing these objects within an exhibition space, taking up a Duchampian approach by leaving room for an exhibition space's recontextualization to turn the ordinary into art. However, Kim reconsidered this method after a Japanese art critic asked him to consider how, in 100 years, these art objects would differ from everyday objects. After three months of pondering this question, Kim decided to it was imperative to more overtly transform the objects. Thereafter, he began to alter his objects; he silkscreened a stained area on a tablecloth, shattered a shovel's blade into pieces, and painted the form of a teacup on a teacup itself.

Yin and Yang series (c. late 1980s to present) Following his move to New York City in 1984, Kim Kulim began to work in more two-dimensional artistic media, starting with his studies in printmaking at the Art Students League of New York. Born from this transition, his Yin and Yang series (begun in the late 1980s) has emphasized dualities—drawing upon the twin concepts of Eastern thought in its title—often through painting, printmaking, and/or collage. When describing this series, Oh Kwang-su observed repeated subjects of ordinary objects, rendered incompletely with forms that oscillate between unfinished and effaced, in ways that foreground the artistic process instead of aiming to capture reality.