Johyun Gallery-Seoul is pleased to present Kim Hong Joo's solo exhibition, on view from September 2 through November 16, 2025. Kim Hong Joo has devoted his practice to exploring the fundamental conditions of painting, beginning with the ST Group in the 1970s and moving through hyperrealist painting, calligraphic works, and figurative imagery to arrive at his current investigations. His trajectory represents not simply a series of stylistic transitions, but a sustained examination of the very foundations upon which painting might be established—each period articulated through its own distinct visual language. This exhibition extends that inquiry, presenting recent works alongside selected historical pieces to interrogate painting's essential possibilities.

The exhibition comprises six paintings and six sculptural works. The paintings reveal a dynamic tension where disparate techniques—controlled bleeding and deliberate mark-making, fluid passages and layered accumulations—coexist as intention intersects with chance. The sculptural pieces, which layer paint onto found discarded objects, translate these painterly concerns into three-dimensional form. Both painting and sculpture transcend conventional medium boundaries, functioning as variations on a singular conceptual approach, privileging process and trace over fixed imagery or iconographic content. Rather than yield to figurative interpretation, the works redirect viewers toward immediate sensory and intellectual engagement with the material relationships between color, surface, and form.

For centuries, painting has developed within an obsession with figuration. The questions "What has been painted?" and "What does it look like?" have become both the most familiar language for explaining painting and, simultaneously, the most difficult habit to break. This tendency to grasp at forms has continuously relegated painting to the dimension of representation, often reducing artworks to mere vessels for conveying content. Kim Hong Joo's painting, however, confronts this habit head-on. Rather than seizing upon specific objects to fix them as meaning, he explores painting's possibilities by erasing the very conditions that establish objects. Through a cyclical process of emergence-condition-encounter-perception, his paintings transform into a practice that dismantles the question "What has been painted?"—a question that has long reduced painting to the mere imitation of specific objects.

Today, images proliferate and are consumed at an unprecedented rate, their excess seemingly intent on reinstating painting as a language of representation. This anachronistic return creates a paradox demanding new forms of visuality. The thesis once posed by postmodernism—to doubt representation and ask how we should see—remains valid. Yet this is not a mere repetition of past discourse, but rather an opportunity to confirm the foundation upon which painting can rediscover meaning within today's excess. We must recall what Martin Heidegger spoke of in The origin of the work of art (1935-1937): the "happening of truth." Truth does not fix itself as completed meaning but emerges in moments where unconcealing and concealing intersect. In today's situation where painting and representation remain synonymous, Kim Hong Joo dismantles that framework and explores under what conditions painting-as-emergence becomes possible.

A brief disclaimer: it is impossible to speak directly of Kim's paintings as depicting anything specific or expressing something concrete. We can only refer to his paintings indirectly—through descriptions of how particular color tones dominate the canvas, or how he completes his paintings by building up lines with thin, water-soaked brushes on canvas cloth. This linguistic detour—describing through color tones, atmosphere, and technique—constitutes a kind of circumlocutive commentary, a view from the periphery The very fact that this “indirect address” becomes the most fitting path to describing his work illuminates the core of his painting: not fixing into clear iconography, but allowing painting to operate as an event that reveals truth. This, first and foremost, must be the valid threshold of understanding before his work.

In Untitled (2021), dominated by blue, two different forms confront each other. On the left, pigment touched by water spreads evenly downward, remaining as a large mass, while on the right, repeated lines from a fine brush create horizontal textures that fill the canvas. The coexistence of these different techniques—bleeding and line-drawing—within a single canvas creates a tension where intent and chance interlock. The uncontrolled flow of paint remains as traces beyond the artist's control, yet beside it, the arrangement of lines—their thickness, color tone, beginning and end all intentional—clearly testifies to the artist's intervention. These two layers do not oppose or cancel each other out; instead, they function as a dual structure within the picture plane, each supporting the other.

Untitled (2024), dominated by red, varies this same problem through different means. A red form spreads from top to bottom over one side of a gray-toned form (a neutral color mixed from various hues), gradually widening as it descends. This results from placing pigment on water pre-applied to the canvas cloth, allowing it to flow—the traces of gravity and time inscribed across the entire canvas. Encircling the red form's perimeter are short lines drawn with a fine brush, juxtaposing bleeding with texture as in the previous blue Untitled. In this way, his paintings avoid fixing the canvas to specific forms, instead showing the process itself of color and material flowing and overlapping, always generating painting's foundational premises like events between what the artist intends and does not intend.

This emergence leads directly to an inquiry into the conditions of thought. Kim Hong Joo's canvases continuously push away readings that probe for specific forms, not allowing predetermined categories like iconography or iconological interpretation to penetrate. Forms that look like flowers but are never flowers, traces that nearly appear as something but transiently scatter—these function as obstacles that frustrate conventional understanding. This serves as a device that neutralizes a priori knowledge while creating conditions that lead viewers to think for themselves. Furthermore, through his method of layering rather than discarding the discarded, he rediscovers the operational basis of images within what appears useless. If Heidegger's emergence is the starting point of truth, then in Kim Hong Joo's work it varies into the form of conditional interference that leads viewers to their own thinking.

The manner in which his paintings unfold extends identically into his approach to three-dimensional objects. The three pieces titled Untitled in this exhibition could commonly be called sculptures, but more accurately, they are concentrated expressions of his perspective. All are completed by taking discarded objects as foundations and adding or scattering leftover paint from canvas paintings. The largest work in terms of volume (again, like his paintings, it is not useful to describe what it resembles, so I refrain from description) stands resembling a human form on a black circular base hollowed inward, with paint flowing from top to bottom, running down the surface like loose folds of a garment while erasing its own contours. The two smaller works each rest upon an object with a solid top surface; in one, hardened paint has coagulated unevenly, appearing as if it melted, while the other is topped with paint of a slightly less saturated color, leaving an impression of contrast. These resulting objects, made by placing paint on things deemed useless, manifest as events through their remaining traces and processes, just as the paintings do.

These methods in painting and sculpture are placed before the viewer as both the event itself and the medium that summons the event. The flows left on canvases or objects, departing from intentions of formal composition, reactivate within viewers' encounters of them. This leads to a level of reciprocal encounter. As Georges Didi-Huberman said, what we see, looks back at us (Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde). The image, therefore, also becomes a field that draws us in. Before Kim Hong Joo's paintings, viewers no longer struggle to recognize but simply abide in a field of color. For example, a certain circular painting in red hues disperses the gaze through overlapping layers of orange, pink, and other colors. The picture plane, being neither flower nor sun, holds the viewer captive. In turn, instead of deciphering meaning, the viewer gets lost in the overlaps and bleeds of color, and this state of lostness transforms into the strangeness of encounter. At this impasse, the question left for the viewer is not what the painting depicts, but how the senses of the I standing before it can be made strange.

That encounter now shifts from the viewer's position to the dimension of perception, a move grounded in the work's very making. Whether applying binder to raw canvas or leaving it bare, he deliberately exposes the physical contact between cloth and pigment, prioritizing the traces of his brushstrokes and the surface texture over the completion of a form with a thick covering of paint. Meanwhile, Untitled (2002), returning for this exhibition, seems to have long predicted the present transformation. The canvas contains a form that resembles clouds, but the artist describes it as "seeming a some-what rather than clouds." This reveals a situation where, within the act of painting, something comes to look like something else by itself. Gazing at this ambiguous form, the viewer perceives how the image looks back at them and how they become subsumed within that gaze. Recent works push this tendency further, almost entirely erasing figuration and thus making the tension between image and viewer all the more acute. Thus our perception, beside his paintings, increasingly unable to fix meaning and is continually reconstituted within the event of encountering the image.

Ultimately, Kim Hong Joo's practice is in the layering of events, a condition that begins anew within viewers' encounters. This attitude has continued from his earliest works. During his activities with the ST Group in the 1970s, he examined the significance of art amidst the era’s avant-garde experiments, which later led to the question of how painting could be established. His hyper-realist paintings of the 1980s were not simple adoption of trends but works that tested the limits of representation, pushing painting's grounds as far as he could. Subsequently, his works that transferred the calligraphy (or typography) of scholar-artists onto the canvas, or his paintings that delicately depicted a single flower, were also attempts that did not repeat figurative description but instead shed the weight of meaning to invoke the problem of language and signs. Though at a glance he seems to have moved between different schools and genres, all of these works ultimately converge into a single, consistent question: a practice of confirming and renewing the possibilities of painting.

Kim's artistic trajectory can therefore be understood as a process of steadily exploring the same problem over a long period, each time in a different language. Emergence, Condition, Encounter, and Perception are the various modulations of this singular problem, the crystallization of a lifetime of thought condensed into his current work. His practice dismantles painting’s old habit—that obsession with figuration—to provide a field where our own thinking can begin alongside the painting itself. It does not close itself off as a finished artwork, but remains in a preparatory state, waiting for the event into which painting might expand. Before his canvases, we no longer ask what we have seen. Instead, his work returns to us more fundamental questions: How should we see? How can we sense the world? In an age that infinitely produces and consumes images, Kim Hong Joo’s painting, through its erased and remaining traces, thus proposes a new way to re-engage with the world.