한국국제교류재단

Born in Wonsan in 1935, Kim Yun Shin is a pioneering firstgeneration Korean sculptor whose work spans wood and stone sculpture, lithography, and painting. Her continuing exploration of materials has expanded the boundaries between sculpture and painting. Photo by Eun Chun, Courtesy of the Hoam Museum of Art

The roots of that sensibility can be traced to a decision that transformed her life. In 1984, at the height of a successful career in Korea, Kim left behind a university position and immigrated to Argentina, drawn by the country’s vast landscapes and abundant forests. When she returned to Korea after four decades, her 2023 solo exhibition at the NamSeoul Museum of Art drew considerable attention from the art world. Among its visitors was RM, the leader of Korea’s most successful male K-pop group BTS, whose enthusiasm for art regularly encourages fans to flock to museums and art galleries. Another visitor proved equally consequential: Adriano Pedrosa, artistic director of the São Paulo Museum of Art who went on to curate the 60th Venice Biennale the following year. An invitation to the world’s most prestigious contemporary art exhibition soon followed, accompanied by growing interest from major international galleries, art fairs, and institutions in New York and London. After decades of working in relative isolation far from her native country, Kim Yun Shin had been rediscovered.

Now in her nineties, she is frequently asked why she devoted her life so completely to art. Her answer remains unchanged.

“Because life is art, and art is life. Why wood sculpture? Trees have been my friends since I was a child. I am the tree, and the tree is me.”

To understand those words, it is necessary to return to the landscape of her childhood. Born in Wonsan, South Hamgyong Province, Kim spent her early years in the mountain village of Anbyeon in the northern part of Gangwon Province, both now part of the DPRK. The youngest of six children, she grew up largely alone. Her older sisters had married and left home, her brother had joined the independence movement, and her father worked as a doctor of traditional Korean medicine in Manchuria.

One day, while walking to school with books slung over her shoulder in a bojagi (traditional Korean wrapping cloth), she encountered dozens of giant pine trees that had been felled. It was the final stage of the Pacific War, and the Japanese military was forcing Korean laborers to extract resin from pine tree roots to try and use it as aviation fuel. To the young girl, who was not yet ten, the sight was heartbreaking. Without any children her own age in her village, Kim regarded the trees as her friends, flowers and insects her conversational partners, and sorghum stalks and mud her toys.

“My mother used to take me to the mountain at dawn. She prayed every day for her only son — the precious heir of three generations — to return home alive,” Kim recalls. “When I would find a small stone, Mother would light a candle on top of it and pray; when the candle burned down, I would bring another stone, place it on top, and she would light another candle.”

In the summer of 1945, Kim traveled to China to visit her father; however, Korea’s liberation arrived before her school holidays concluded, prompting him to send her back. Crossing the Tumen River with a woman he had assigned to accompany her, Kim witnessed scenes of violence and loss amid the chaos that followed Japan’s surrender, before eventually reuniting with her mother. While her brother returned to Korea in 1947 and took them in, the Korean War erupted soon after, sweeping the fifteen-year-old into the tide of displacement and refugee life. Kim would never see her father or sisters again, and even today, she is startled by the sound of fireworks.

Rather than allowing these experiences to remain sources of personal trauma, Kim transformed them into the foundation of her artistic vision. The felled pine trees of her childhood and the countless lives lost to war became enduring sources of reflection and compassion. These memories found expression in her Stacking Wishes series that she created during the 1970s. Constructed by layering wooden elements without a single nail, the works recalled the traditional Korean building methods used in hanok. Because many of these early installations were temporary and difficult to preserve, Kim gradually developed new sculptural forms that involved carving and shaping the wood itself before stacking the components together. The resulting works have often been compared to ancient totems, though the artist has described them as “trees of life to which life clings.”

“Song of My Soul 2013–50.” 2013. Oil on canvas. 150 × 460 cm. Private collection.
© Kim Yun Shin
Photo by the Kim Yun Shin Institute of Art, Courtesy of the artist

“Tree Full of Songs 2013-16V1.” 2025. Acrylic on aluminum cast. 135 × 202 × 56 cm. Collection Kim Yun Shin Institute of Art.
© Kim Yun Shin
Photo by Eun Chun, Courtesy of the Hoam Museum of Art

In 1955, Kim entered the Department of Sculpture at Hongik University, becoming one of Korea’s first formally trained sculptors and studying alongside figures who would later become leading voices in Korean contemporary art, including Ha Chong-hyun, a master of Dansaekhwa(Korea’s monochrome movement), and Lee Seung-taek, a pioneer of the Korean avant-garde.

In December 1964, she departed for Paris to continue her studies at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. The experience broadened her artistic horizons. Exposure to contemporary European art deepened her understanding of abstraction as a means of expressing inner experiences. She witnessed the repercussions of the 1967 East Berlin Affair (known as Dongbaekrim Incident in Korean) — a politically motivated crackdown in which agents of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) abducted expatriate intellectuals and students from Europe on fabricated espionage charges. This event directly affected the Korean artistic community in Europe, including the painter Lee Ungno, whom Kim knew during her time in Paris. Even amid this climate of political repression, she immersed herself in the radical spirit that ultimately fueled the May 1968 student and worker protests in France. In the spring of 1969, news of her mother’s critical illness prompted her return to Korea.

The subsequent decade marked a period of her growing as a sculptor. In 1973, she represented Korea at the 12th São Paulo Biennale alongside eleven other Korean artists, including Lee Ufan, Kwon Young-woo, and Kim Tschang-yeul. The following year, she helped establish the Korea Women Sculptors Association, the country’s first such organization. She was, in every sense, in her prime. Beginning in 1978, she developed a distinctive method of carving the inside of the tree while leaving the bark intact, allowing nature and the artist’s spirit to coexist within a single form.

Kim eventually distilled this philosophy into the concept she calls Hab-i-hab-il Bun-i-bun-il (合二合一 分二分一), translated as “Add Two Add One, Divide Two Divide One.” The phrase expresses a continuous process of union and separation that she sees reflected in nature, human relationships, and artistic creation itself.

In her artist statement, “Attempting to Converse with Materials,” she writes: “Two meet as one through hab-i (joining two into one), and that union then divides once again into two. Like human existence, this cycle repeats endlessly. The lines and planes created through division (bun) using a chainsaw are simultaneously acts of joining and dividing. My spirit, my existence, and my soul finally become one.”

Installation view of Kim Yun Shin: Two Be One, a retrospective on the first floor of the Hoam museum of Art in yongin, Gyeonggi Province. The exhibition traced the artist’s development from her formative years through the 1990s.
Photo by Eun Chun, Courtesy of the Hoam Museum of Art

Kim first traveled to Argentina in 1983 for a brief visit with her niece who had settled there. Her reasons for following her niece’s example a year later were simple yet profound: She was captivated by the expansive landscape, drawn to the warmth of the people, and inspired by the large, sturdy trees that provided ideal material for sculptures.

Having survived colonial rule, national division, and war, she felt she had nothing to fear when starting over in a new country. With the help of locals, she hauled fallen trees from the street back home to create her first new pieces. She also sought out exhibition opportunities on her own initiative, including at the Korean Embassy, and successfully persuaded Roberto del Villano, then director of the Buenos Aires Museum of Modern Art, to showcase her work. Her debut solo exhibition in Argentina opened in 1986, and forty years later, she continues to work there.

Kim’s artistic process begins not with an idea but with the material itself. Rather than searching for wood to suit a predetermined concept, she spends days observing each log. Its size, shape, hardness, scent, bark, knots, and growth rings are carefully studied before any cutting begins. She describes this process as a “conversation.” Only after understanding the wood does she finally pick up her chainsaw.

The COVID-19 pandemic unexpectedly led her practice in a new direction. Unable to source large logs, she began collecting discarded pieces of timber from her surroundings. Joining them together without nails, she raised them upright and applied colors to their surfaces, breathing new life into the weathered wood. The resulting works occupied a space between painting and sculpture, further dissolving boundaries that never held much significance for her. Ironically, the constraints of her isolation unified these two worlds into one.

Whereas many modern artists viewed distant cultures in South America and Africa as sources of inspiration, Kim immersed herself directly in another world. By choosing the path of an outsider at a time when Korean modernism was flourishing, she approached questions of identity from an unexpected direction. Rather than refining artistic vocabularies imported from the West, she sought to reconnect with the cultural and philosophical traditions embedded deep within Korea’s ancient heritage.

For Kim Yun Shin, a work of art is never a finished object but part of an ongoing process of transformation. Joining and dividing, growth and decay, loss and renewal — these opposing forces coexist in her work, just as they do in life.

After more than six decades, the conviction that has sustained her remains unchanged.

“My wish is to die while working. Art is life itself.”