Johyun Gallery is pleased to present Kim Chong Hak: On paper, a solo exhibition running from July 3 to August 17, 2025. This exhibition traces the evolution of Kim’s painterly practice from its earliest moments, shedding new light on the artist’s visual language through his lesser-known body of work. Of particular significance are his works from before the 1990s, as well as a substantial collection of large-scale drawings of line and negative space that encapsulate the sensations and memories of life. Over 140 works are on view, offering a rare opportunity to encounter the full scope of artistic inquiry put forth by the Painter of Seoraksan.

The exhibition unfolds across two floors, each providing a distinct vantage point into Kim’s creative universe. The first floor reconstructs the artist’s studio, populated with objects that embody his ludic sensibility and instinct for creative improvisation. The second floor presents a chronological survey of works from the 1960s through the 2020s, including woodblock prints, watercolors, and pencil drawings—each reflecting Kim’s ongoing experimentation with material, form, and the boundaries between abstraction and figuration. On Paper is anchored in Kim’s earliest drawings and formative works, and is the first scholarly project to examine the artist’s evolving cosmos and creative vitality, oscillating between completion and incompletion, and tracing the international recognition his practice achieved from the late 1990s to the early 2000s.

For Kim Chong Hak, drawing is the trace of intuition, reached through an intense and intuitive engagement with nature and the honing of perception. It is more than the tracing of lines and preparation. To him, drawing is an artistic act on its own, from the inception to the completion of a work. Immersed in the rhythms of the mountain, he has spent decades painting wildflowers, forests, and snowscapes that reveal both the visible and invisible structures of the landscape. His practice is rooted in the conviction that nature embodies both abstraction and figuration, and that the act of drawing is a way of “harmonizing the rhythms of the external world and the inner life.” His indefatigable drawing becomes both a practice of daily discipline and a quiet form of meditation—a pursuit of the fleeting sensations that animate the world.

Kim’s drawings are condensed expressions of immersion and sensory distillation. A single line brushing past a tree, the flow of ink tracing the contours of a mountain—these gestures, stripped of embellishment, achieve a heightened degree of directness and honesty. Drawings accumulated across decades form a sprawling mental landscape, the sheets of paper stacked up on the worktable, unable to be contained within a single painting.

This exhibition marks the first attempt to focus exclusively on Kim Chong Hak’s drawing practice, offering an opportunity to trace the trajectory of his formal experimentation and artistic thought. Here, drawing is defined expansively to include not only line drawings but also watercolors and woodblock prints, presented as a field of thought that transcends the preparatory stage for painting to become an independent visual language and stream of consciousness.

Comprising 150 works, the exhibition traces Kim’s gaze as it evolves chronologically: from early experiments in abstraction, through observations of nature, cityscapes, and objects, to the liberated brushwork of his later years. The recreation of Kim’s studio on the first floor offers visitors a rare glimpse into the site of his decades-long daily creative discipline, echoing the mugu (無垢, unspoiled) spirit that was inscribed in his Seoraksan studio. By experiencing both the works and the space, visitors are offered the opportunity to engage more deeply with the world of Kim Chong Hak’s art.