At 91 years old, Kim Yoon-shin is still an active sculptor who spends her days cutting wood with a chainsaw in her studio from lunch until evening. “I want to work until I’m over 100 years old,” she says. “My dream is to leave the world at that very moment while working.”
She is currently holding a solo exhibition titled ‘New Continuity’ at Lehmann Maupin Seoul in Hannam-dong, running through December 24. The exhibition features 35 works, ranging from her 1999 painting ‘Untitled’ to her new painting series ‘Light of the Soul,’ alongside various sculptures and painting-sculptures. The newly unveiled ‘Light of the Soul’ series combines geometric structures with organic forms reminiscent of seeds, flowers, and waves, capturing the cyclical power of life beginning and continuing. By repeatedly building up, scraping away, and stamping paint on canvas, she creates a dynamic visual surface.
Reflecting on her time studying sculpture and lithography at the Γcole Nationale SupΓ©rieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1964, she shared, “Learning lithography taught me that painting isn’t just about using a brush. Because every stamping moment captures my emotions and energy, no two pieces are ever alike, even with the same materials and forms.”
Her wood sculptures bear the marks of her hands holding chisels and chainsaws, blending with the irregular grain of the wood. The ‘Singing Tree’ series consists of these wooden sculptures cast in bronze and painted, a method designed to preserve the outdoor works for a long time. For Kim, painting and sculpture are not separate tasks, but distinct ways of understanding the universe, with the final artwork achieved only when these two acts merge on a single surface.
Her polychrome sculptures, which became prominent in the 2000s, draw inspiration from the animism of the indigenous Mapuche people of South America and childhood memories of playing with ice pop sticks and colored candle wax. The overlapping sense of time as she shapes materials with her hands, combined with cheerful color combinations and brushstrokes on wood grain, infuses her work with vitality. Kim refers to this process of painting colorful designs onto sculpture surfaces as ‘painting-sculpture.’ “I am exploring the new possibilities that arise when three-dimensional sculpture meets two-dimensional painting,” she noted. “I want to leave something behind so future generations can discover something new. I work with the mindset of leaving the term ‘painting-sculpture’ in art history.”
Born in Wonsan, Hamgyeongnam-do in 1935, Kim graduated from Hongik University in 1959 before studying sculpture and lithography in Paris. She immigrated to Argentina in 1984 and opened a museum named after herself in Buenos Aires in 2008. Following her participation in the main exhibition of the 2024 Venice Biennale, she permanently returned to Korea, where she continues her artistic career.
Kim’s representative work, ‘Sum of Two, Division of Two,’ is currently featured in the RM collection exhibition ‘RM x SFMoMA: Between You and Me’ at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Additionally, she is participating in the ‘Garden Project: Things Carved’ at the Seoul 63 Building’s Pompidou Center Hanwha’s Oudolf Garden alongside fellow female sculptors Shin Meekyoung and Omyochul. Designed by Dutch landscape architect Piet Oudolf, the outdoor garden features 13 flower beds showcasing over 25,000 plants across 50 global species that transform scenery each season, harmonizing with Kim’s painted sculptures, Shin’s soap angelic figures weathering naturally over time, and Omyochul’s mysterious life-form installations.
Kim has maintained a bustling schedule this year, holding a massive retrospective as the first Korean female artist since the Hoam Museum of Art’s opening, and walking the red carpet at the Busan International Film Festival last month for a documentary premiere. Set to be released next year, the documentary ‘Kim Yoon-shin is Not in the Museum’ chronicles her life as a working woman and the supporters who made it possible. “I just keep doing it because it’s what I have to do, because it’s my work, and because it’s my life,” Kim said. Kim Ran, director of the Kim Yoon-shin Institute of Fine Arts and a former student of Kim when she taught sculpture at Sungshin Women’s University in the 1970s, remarked, “Some might find the film calm, but Kim Yoon-shin’s climax has not yet arrived.”
