Johyun Gallery is pleased to present As it is, a solo exhibition by painter Kim Taek Sang, on view from August 26 through November 8, 2026. Presented simultaneously across Johyun Gallery Dalmaji, Johyun Gallery Haeundae, and Johyun Gallery Seoul, the exhibition brings together more than thirty works, including the artist’s new Ice blossom series, a new large-scale painting, and a video installation work.

Kim Taek Sang has pursued a painterly inquiry mediated by water and pigment for over thirty years. He received his B.F.A. in Painting from Chung-Ang University and his M.F.A. in Western Painting from Hongik University. After a long career teaching and mentoring future generations at Cheongju University, he retired in 2020 and has since fully devoted himself to his practice. Over the decades, Kim has cultivated a singular visual methodology that harmonizes nature's autonomous generative processes with pictorial materiality. As water and pigment diffuse, dry, and deposit in layers over the canvas following the rhythm of the seasons, his work operates through an ethos of relinquishing human agency. This methodology is the expression of Kim's rigorous painterly practice, embracing natural shifts not as passive subjects, but as active partners in mutual coexistence, respecting their singular rhythms and durations.

Kim Taek Sang’s signature series—Breathing, Flows, and Resonance—embody the temporality of spring, summer, and autumn, respectively. The Ice blossom series, unveiled for the first time in this exhibition, expands his artistic domain into winter. The artist states that the fourth season had previously been inaccessible due to environmental constraints. While earlier works focused on the fluid movement and evaporation of water, this new body of work illuminates the trajectories of crystallization formed through thermal shifts and freezing. As water and pigment repeatedly freeze under sub-zero temperatures and thaw, the "ice blossoms" on the canvas become crystalized denials of all artificial intervention, standing as pure products of nature's self-forging process. By welcoming winter into his practice, Kim brings to fruition his long ascetic journey across the seasons, settling the full resonance of time embodied by water and pigment onto the canvas.

Furthermore, the exhibition introduces three innovative formats that expand Kim Taek Sang’s artistic vocabulary across the gallery’s three locations. At Johyun Gallery Dalmaji, the moving-image work There utilizes ultra-microscopic photography to reveal the hidden interior life of his canvases, translating the subtle movement of minute pigment particles floating between layered strata into a dynamic visual experience. Meanwhile, Johyun Gallery Haeundae showcases Non-linearity, a key piece within his winter series that highlights the organic, white crystalline lines generated by freezing temperatures, introducing a formal language distinct from his earlier fluid gestures. Unifying these site-specific presentations across all three venues are five monumental paintings, each expanding to over ten meters in scale to capture the multi-faceted variations of water within a single, continuous breath. Far from attempting to master natural phenomena, these new works intensify Kim’s defining ethos: a radical surrender of artistic agency that allows the medium to self-manifest.

Beneath the quiet surfaces of Kim Taek Sang’s practice lies a sharp engagement with the contemporary zeitgeist. Often categorized within Post-Dansaekhwa or abstract painting, his work moves beyond mere formal aesthetics to offer a phenomenological inquiry into intangible time condensed within matter. In an era where rapid advancements in artificial intelligence outsource even the most routine decisions to machines, Kim’s persistent commitment to analog waiting stands as an intentional act of resistance, reasserting the value of temporal stillness in an age of algorithmic acceleration.

This posture embodies an “aesthetics of non-egoic emergence"—a deliberate surrender of artistic intent that allows the canvas to become of its own self-so-ness, setting his practice apart from the formal reductionism of Western Minimalism or Monochrome. His performative patience in awaiting the artwork's course of taking up its own patterns, paired with an ecological reverence for nature’s intrinsic state, cuts through an age obsessed with hyper-density, efficiency, and control. By restoring our shared rhythm with the natural world, As it is reaffirms the aesthetic necessity and timely resonance of Kim Taek Sang’s painting