The solo exhibition “Mountain” by artist Minjung Kim, who has explored the traditions of East Asian calligraphy and ink painting while expanding them into the compositional lexicon of contemporary abstraction, will be on view until February 9, 2025, at the Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, southern France.

Fondation Maeght is one of the most recognized contemporary art foundations in Europe, with an extensive history of collecting and exhibiting major figures in twentieth-century art. This exhibition highlights Minjung Kim’s major series Mountain and Nuit de la mer, highlighting her embrace of natural and spontaneous processes as well as investigations on lines and gestures that together produced her signature poeticism.

Mountain started as a seemingly oxymoronic task of visualizing the sound of ocean waves. The powerful crashing of waves against the cliff are transposed onto numerous layers of ink, which recalled mountains in the artist’s hometown Gwangju, representations of the idea of mountains in her mind’s eye.

The works therefore do not cease at depicting nature but search for the essence of mountains as they dwell within the artist’s memory—each a vast mental landscape boiled down to a single poem.

On the other hand, Nuit de la mer imparts the momentary impression of light touching the surface of the night sea, expressed through the textured surface of hanji (traditional Korean paper) that seems to absorb the scene into the canvas. In fact, this series consists of pieces of paper trimmed out while creating Mountain, which were then burnt and recomposed—it metaphorizes circulation and rebirth where works that initially transformed water into mountains return to the shape of water.

This exhibition sees true light within the organic harmony between nature, Fondation Maeght’s space, and its artworks. Kim’s works elevating nature are placed next to breathing nature itself, leading to moments of resonance across species. This vividly poetic experience truthfully conveys the artist’s continued contemplations on life, death, and circulation.

Facing the Korean art scene in the 1980s that was dominated by male artists in two major camps of Dansaekhwa and Minjung Art, Minjung Kim (b. 1962) decided to leave Korea in 1991 to study at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Italy.

There, Kim’s practice shifted from East Asian color paintings to abstract paintings in ink and color, inspired by the unpredictable effects of pigment absorbing into hanji paper. In the 2000s, her work shifted to cutting and burning hanji paper, disassembling and reimagining the canons of East Asian painting in favor of a meditative yet experimental process.

References

• 김민정, Minjung Kim (Artist Website)
• 갤러리현대(Gallery Hyundai), [News] Minjung Kim 김민정 : Mountain
• Fondation Maeght, Mountain

Ji Yeon Lee has been working as an editor for the media art and culture channel AliceOn since 2021 and worked as an exhibition coordinator at samuso (now Space for Contemporary Art) from 2021 to 2023.