Kim Yun Shin, a first-generation Korean woman sculptor, began interacting with Lee Ungno after enrolling at École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts’ Academy of Painting and Sculpture in 1964. At the time, Lee had lived in Paris for five years; launched his European career by signing an exclusive contract in 1962 with Galerie Paul Facchetti, the leader of the Informel school; and been gaining greater artistic recognition through presentations of his work throughout Europe, including in Austria and Switzerland. Kim’s first year in Paris was also the year in which Lee founded L’Académie de Peinture Orientale de Paris inside Musée Cernuschi with sponsorship from artists, critics, and philosophers, including Hans Hartung, Pierre Soulages, Zao Wou Ki, and Chang Dai-chien.
This year marks the 60th anniversary of Kim and Lee’s first encounter in Paris and the 40th anniversary of Kim’s move to Argentina to focus on her art. The Lee Ungno Museum is proud to present approximately 50 paintings and sculptures that reflect the friendship between these two Korean artists in Europe as well as the artistic world that Kim created in Argentina, one of the countries located farthest from Korea. This exhibition is especially significant for its inclusion of several artworks from Kim Yun Shin’s early days in Paris that have never been displayed in Korea as well as the majority of her Argentina artworks.
Lee and Kim’s meeting in 1964 proved to be influential for both. Lee mentioned to Kim that he wished to learn sculpting from her, resulting in Kim teaching him how to carve and shape wood. Kim’s weekly visit to Lee’s home grew into a fruitful professional exchange that lasted approximately four years before being cut short by the East Berlin incident in 1967. It is important to note that the intersection of Lee’s and Kim’s art lies in something that goes far beyond the external similarities of their sculpting styles.
One major belief that Lee and Kim shared was that sculpture and painting are not two parts of a dichotomy but, rather, complementary genres. Both expanded their artistic worlds based on a flexible attitude toward the limitations of sculpture and painting through radical experimentation with the two- and three-dimensional conducted via horizontal interactions between Kim, a recently-arrived art student, and Lee, an established mainstream artist, as equals.
After visiting her nephew, who had immigrated to Argentina, in the winter of 1984, Kim, fascinated by South America’s diversity of natural resources, decided to make it her home. For the next four decades, Kim created a unique artistic language that is best described as Eastern philosophy grounded in naturalism.
Kim described the foundational ideology of her art as the Eastern philosophy-inspired “Add Two Add One, Divide Two Divide One,” or a phenomenon in which two disparate entities interact to become one, after which one divides once more into two, each becoming its own entity. For Kim, the act of sculpting is akin to the process of pouring her spirit into a tree (becoming one), dividing a space (dividing into two), and the tree becoming a free-standing artwork (becoming its own entity). Such grounding in “natural abstract,” a genre in which the artist merges with nature to become a single entity and then diverges from it to produce a new brand of art, is another element that Kim’s art shares with that of Lee Ungno.
This exhibition chronologically explores the visual language that Kim created based on a natural abstract foundation. Homi Bhabha, a theorist of postcolonialism, argues that culture, the substance of a nation or a people’s identity, lies not in dichotomies such as ego vs. the other or first-world vs. third-world but in an ambivalent “third space.” The exchange between two Korean artists in Paris, the center of Western art at the time, on a foundation of Eastern philosophy and the artistic world Kim created in Argentina represent versions of Korean culture full of ambivalence and dynamism that lie beyond a quagmire of prejudice and narrow-mindedness.
Learn more on the Lee Ungno Museum website.