Kim Tschang-Yeul: Recurrence at Tina Kim Gallery

Tina Kim Gallery in Chelsea presents Kim Tschang-Yeul: Recurrence from November 5 to December 19, 2026. It is the gallery's third solo exhibition of the Korean émigré painter, who spent five decades on luminous, hyperrealistic waterdrops. The show focuses on works from the 1980s through the 2010s, a period when Kim embraced a more tactile materiality, tried varied surfaces and grounds, and began to work on a larger scale.

Born in 1929 in Maengsan, in what is now North Korea, Kim fled south at seventeen amid the violence and division that followed liberation from Japanese rule, and settled in Seoul. After studying painting at Seoul National University, he became a leading figure in Korean Art Informel in the 1950s, alongside Ha Chong-Hyun and Park Seo-Bo. His early paintings, dark and earthy with surfaces that seem split by wounds and fissures, are often read against the scars of war. In 1965, encouraged by his mentor Kim Whanki, he moved to New York on a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship and studied printmaking at the Art Students League. There he met Op Art, Pop Art and Minimalism and got to know Nam June Paik. He moved to Paris in 1969 and returned to Korea in 2017.

The waterdrop began by chance. In a makeshift studio outside Paris, Kim splashed water on the back of his canvases, and the way the drops caught light led him to seek a way to paint them. His 1973 solo show at Knoll International in Paris established the motif as the core of his mature work. It was never only a feat of illusion. Repeating it helped him work through memories of violence and loss from the Korean War. In a letter to the critic Lee Yil, he described painting waterdrops as dissolving everything into transparency and aiming for the extinction of ego, a view shaped by Taoist and Zen thought.

At the center of the show is the Recurrence series, begun in the mid-1980s. It grew out of earlier waterdrops painted over newspaper, such as a 1975 work on a page of Le Figaro. The series uses characters drawn mainly from the Thousand Character Classic, a sixth-century primer for literacy and calligraphy that Kim first met as a child through his grandfather. In some paintings the characters are so orderly they resemble typeface. In others they are obscured, faded or fragmented until they become an abstract ground. One 1989 work in ink is layered so densely that the characters cannot be read. Language moves from something to be read toward something to be seen.

The exhibition also includes Waterdrop paintings from the 2000s and 2010s, among them two large classical compositions with drops spilling across raw linen. Two Nuit paintings trace back to Événement de la Nuit (1972), the earliest waterdrop Kim exhibited, which showed a single drop on solid black. Here the drops hang in dark grounds that suggest night stillness or a heavy rainstorm.

A major retrospective was held at the MMCA in Seoul in 2025. Kim's work is in the collections of M+, Centre Pompidou, the Hirshhorn, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Museum of Modern Art, Japan, among others.