Lot 63: Kim Whanki , 1913-1974 Les Oiseaux Volants (Flying Birds) oil on canvas

signed whanki and dated 57 oil on canvas

19 5/8 by 24 in. 50 by 61 cm.

Pierre Courthion, Whanki, Paris, 1983, p. 22, illustrated

Private Collection, France

An early proponent of abstract art in Korea, artist Kim Whanki (1913-1974) created paintings that harmonized experimental forms of expression with Korean sensibilities. Kim's images served as a bridge between a past rooted in unchanging traditions and an emerging modernity, as South Koreans sought a new national identity in the aftermath of Japanese colonialism and the Korean War (1950-53). Kim was born February 27, 1913 into a wealthy family on the small rural island of Gijwa in South Jeolla Province. He moved at an early age to Seoul and attended high school in Japan. With few formal art institutions in Korea at the time, it was in Tokyo that a generation of Korean artists coming of age in the 1930s encountered avant-garde European art, from constructivism to surrealism. Kim graduated from the art department of Nihon University in 1936 and exhibited some of his earliest work at the Association of Free Artists (Jiyu Bijutsuka Kyokai). An avant-garde group begun in 1937, the association promoted experimentation in a variety of movements and styles, as opposed to the predominately impressionist techniques taught in the Japanese academy system. Influenced by cubism and fauvism, Kim's early works reveal an interest in developing lyrical compositions through the rhythmic arrangement of abstract forms and bright colors. With the looming threat of war, an increasingly militaristic Japan censored avant-garde artistic activities and many participating Korean artists returned home. Kim went to Korea after holding his first solo exhibition Amagi Gallery in Tokyo in 1937. Following Korean liberation from Japan in 1945, many Korean artists sought to divorce themselves from their Japanese training. Certain styles of painting, particularly chaesaek-wha, or color ink painting, were branded as too Japanese and subsequently rejected by those intent on creating a purely "national" form of expression. Abstract and expressionist oil painting gained greater visibility at this time, since oil paint was a relatively unseen medium and did not conjure such strong negative associations at the time. Kim and Tokyo-trained artists Yoo Youngkuk and Yi Gyusang organized the first New Realists exhibition group in 1948, which was an early promoter of abstract artists. Such independently organized exhibitions allowed artists to present works that did not fit into the more stringent criteria of the National Exhibition, a state-sponsored juried show. Kim also played a formative role in Korean art education, introducing abstraction techniques into the institutional curriculum at newly founded schools. Kim taught at Seoul National University's art department from 1948-50, and would go on to teach at Hong-ik University art school in the fifties. Despite his association with avant-garde artistic groups in Japan that embraced the forces of modernization, Kim also incorporated traditional Korean forms into his work. He began collecting antiques in the 1940s, particularly Joseon dynasty baekja, or white porcelain, prized above all for its elegant simplicity. During the Korean War, he painted idyllic landscapes filled with the sea, mountains, the moon, and houses with unmistakably Korean tiled rooftops, conjuring such natural scenery partly from his memory and partly from his imagination. Although a later generation of artists promoting realist painting would come to see Kim's work as escapist rather than engaging with the harsh social realities brought about by the Korean War, it was perhaps the profound social and spiritual upheavals experienced by the country that led him to tradition and the unchanging symbols of nature as the foundation for a modern Korean art. When Kim left Korea to live in Paris from 1956-59, the traditional Asian motifs of cranes, mountain peaks, pines and plum blossoms could still be found in his work. While his compositions in Paris continued to conjure the rotund shapes of the Korean porcelains that he had prized, most of which had been destroyed during the Korean War, he also began painting in blue, a color that he associated with the infinite expanse of the sky. In Paris, he used traditional symbols as materials for experimentation. A work such as Les Oiseaux Volants (Lot 63, 1957), painted during his Paris period, plays with effects of figuration and abstraction through a variation on a traditional Asian symbol of longevity. Four white cranes glide across a thickly painted sky, settled with a field of interlocking blue fragments. The moon casts a dark silhouette over the birds, creating a transparent, stained glass-like effect. His canvases became less figurative when he moved to New York in 1963, where he lived until his death. Dots, squares and fields of color painted on raw canvas in a calligraphic manner became his modes of expression. He turned increasingly to minimal forms, particularly as he came into contact with the works of Mark Rothko and other color field paintings in New York. However, his paintings maintained an emotional resonance, tinged with the memories of his distant homeland, as suggested by the title of one his most famous paintings, "Where, in What Form, Shall We Meet Again?" -Iris Moon