Minjung Kim – TEFAF

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Artist Minjung Kim Reflects on a Life and Practice Guided by Intuition

BY MARIA VOGEL PHOTOGRAPHY BY ANTOINE LIPPENS

Minjung Kim’s essence is her artistry. The resulting material output begins to feel secondary when you grasp Kim’s distinct mode of operating through life and accompanying

artistic practice.
In what could be considered a destiny-defining moment, as a young

child, Kim gravitated toward the Hanji paper in her father’s print shop in Gwangju, a mountainous metropolitan city in the southwest corner of Korea. Decades and many miles now separate Kim from this foundational time, but what remains is her connection to the material at the center of her practice.

Over time, Hanji became an extension of Kim’s own body, and in her studio space, feeling determines decision-making. Taking in the 61-year-old artist’s œuvre, one could assume that meticulous planning and consideration of form preclude putting material to surface. Quite the opposite approach, Kim says that when she is creating “it’s all play.” She foregoes any sort of narrative premise and leans in to simply understanding the material and its reactive qualities.

To Kim, being an artist has been the driving force of her life, her reason to continue forward, a means of survival. The chapters of her life—from childhood, early adulthood, to now—have looked and felt very unalike, but what has endured is her perseverance with the alluring paper she discovered long ago.

At an age when most might be settling into a slower phase of life, Kim is just coming into her own, both personally and professionally. In the past few years, following decades of steady ascent, she has been the subject of major institutional exhibitions and significant market attention. Institutionally, Kim’s work has been exhibited at the Hill Art Foundation, Gwangju Museum of Art, the Langen Foundation, and at Palazzo Caboto during the Venice Biennale in 2015, among others. In November 2024, her work will be shown during a solo exhibition at Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul de Vence.

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Here, Kim reflects on the paths that brought her to today, her kinship with materials, and guiding philosophies that continue to propel her practice forward.

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