KIM WHANKI
1913 - 1974
A pioneer of Korean abstraction who turned moons, mountains, water, memory, and eventually thousands of painted dots into a language of his own.
A pioneer of Korean abstraction who turned moons, mountains, water, memory, and eventually thousands of painted dots into a language of his own.
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Kim Whanki spent much of his life asking a question that still feels surprisingly current: What might modern art look like if you entered it from your own place in the world?
Born on an island off Korea’s southwest coast in 1913, Kim encountered European abstraction while studying in Japan, then continued developing his work in Seoul, Paris, and eventually New York. But he did not simply trade Korean imagery for international modernism. Mountains, moon jars, trees, birds, islands, sky, and sea moved through his paintings, sometimes recognizable and sometimes transformed almost beyond recognition.
By the final years of his life, many of those forms had become fields of tiny marks: dots accumulating across large canvases in shifting rhythms and shades of blue.
If the later paintings initially look like pure abstraction, stay with them. Look for what a dot might hold: a star, a sound, a person, a memory, a place far away.
What was happening in the world while they were becoming an artist? Explore the history.
Find the smallest unit of the painting. A dot, line, square, curve, patch of color. What happens when Kim repeats it hundreds or thousands of times?
Look at the spaces between things. Do the gaps feel empty, or are they doing as much work as the marks?
Follow the blue. Is it one blue? Look for shifts in density, temperature, darkness, transparency, and depth.
Look for nature without looking for a landscape. Could a shape suggest water, a mountain, a moon, an island, a night sky, without actually depicting one?
Change your distance. What becomes visible from far away? What disappears? Then move close enough to notice individual marks.
Look for evidence of time. Where can you sense repetition, labor, hesitation, variation, or the movement of a hand?
Taking in art does not have to happen all at once.
Looking now is about what is in front of you: what catches your eye, what changes as you move closer or farther away, what you notice when you give the work more than a quick glance.
Looking later is about what stays with you. A color. A shape. A question. Something you did not fully understand in the gallery but find yourself thinking about afterward.
The prompts below are not meant to tell you what to see. They are simply ways to spend a little more time with the work, and to notice what it might open up for you.
Looking now:
-Find an earlier Kim Whanki painting and one of his later dot paintings. What seems to have disappeared? What might simply have changed form?
-Choose one blue painting and spend a minute looking only at differences within the blue. How many kinds of blue can one painting contain?
-Zoom into a field of dots until you can no longer see the whole composition. Then zoom back out. At what distance does it stop being many marks and become one thing?
Looking later:
-What seemed simple at first but became more complicated after spending time with it?
-If you had to describe the work without using the words “blue,” “dots,” or “abstract,” what would you say?
-What did the painting make you notice about repetition, distance, or attention that you didn’t expect to notice?
RM has described Kim Whanki as one of the first Korean painters he came to know when he began studying Korean art and as one of his favorite painters. He owns Whanki’s work. Long before Between You and Me, he had also publicly visited and shared encounters with Whanki’s paintings.
Now Whanki provides the literal entrance to RM’s first museum exhibition. Between You and Me begins with SFMOMA’s monumental blue 26-I-70 #141 from 1970. Nearby is another 1970 Whanki painting from RM’s own collection, a much smaller work that RM says normally hung in his living room.
The story behind the painting:
Kim Whanki left Korea for New York in 1963, hoping to establish his work internationally. He died there in 1974. Five years later, his widow, Kim Hyang-an, gave 26-I-70 #141 to SFMOMA. RM knew that history. In the exhibition audio guide, he explains that he wanted the two Whanki paintings to create a conversation between his collection and SFMOMA’s, and between Koreans and Americans.
So Whanki is more than an artist included in the exhibition. RM uses him to establish its first coordinates: blue and water, Korea and America, personal collection and public museum, one generation carrying something toward another.
An island at the beginning
Kim Whanki was born in 1913 on Anjwa Island, off Korea’s southwest coast. Sky, sea, mountains, islands, and moonlight would remain part of his visual world even after he left Korea. His later paintings can look far removed from landscape, but nature never entirely disappears from them.
He kept painting jars
Kim loved Korean ceramics, especially Joseon white porcelain. Moon jars appear repeatedly in his earlier paintings alongside moons, plum blossoms, mountains, birds, and other forms. Even after moving to Paris, he joked in a letter that he was still painting jars so persistently he might become a “jar ghost.”
The joke reveals something important: international travel did not make him less interested in Korean forms. It gave him another place from which to reconsider them.
Paris did not erase Korea
Kim lived in Paris from 1956 to 1959. Surrounded by European modern art, he continued painting Korean subjects while simplifying them into increasingly abstract arrangements of shape and color.
Rather than choosing between “Korean” and “modern,” he kept testing whether those categories had to be opposites at all.
New York changed the scale
Kim moved to New York in 1963 after representing Korea at the São Paulo Biennale. There he encountered American abstraction at enormous scale and experimented with collage, newspaper, papier-mâché, sand, oils, and increasingly spare compositions.
Eventually dots began taking over.
By around 1970, they could cover almost the entire canvas.
A dot could hold a person
Kim’s dots were not simply a decorative system. Writing about his work, he connected them with stars, sounds, friends, mountains, rivers, and memories of Korea.
That makes the late paintings worth approaching twice: first as enormous abstract fields, and then as accumulations of tiny individual marks. The cosmic and the personal occupy the same surface.
Sources: Whanki Museum; National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea; Hoam Museum of Art; LACMA; Christie’s; SFMOMA; Korea JoongAng Daily; contemporary reporting and archival material on RM x SFMOMA: Between You and Me.
Kim Whanki is sometimes placed beside American artists such as Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, whose large fields of color he encountered during his New York years. That comparison can be useful, especially when looking at scale, color, repetition, and the possibility that an abstract painting can become an environment rather than simply an image.
But it can also hide what is distinctive about Whanki.
His path toward abstraction did not begin in New York. Long before arriving there, he had been reducing moons, mountains, trees, birds, islands, and Korean ceramics into increasingly elemental forms. His dots did not suddenly replace that world. They grew out of it.
Look at the trajectory rather than treating the late paintings as a destination: moon becomes circle; landscape becomes rhythm; stars become points; blue becomes space.
At SFMOMA, another conversation becomes possible. Whanki appears near Yves Klein, whose intense relationship with blue developed in a very different cultural and artistic context. Their work can look related from across a gallery.
The interesting question is not simply how they are alike. It is what each artist asks blue to do.
Yves Klein made blue a subject in itself. The French artist developed the intensely saturated color now known as International Klein Blue and used it across paintings, performances, and sculpture. In his sponge works, pigment saturates a natural sponge until color and object become almost inseparable. Placed near Kim Whanki, Éponge (SE251) offers another way into blue: Whanki builds a seemingly boundless field through thousands of repeated marks, while Klein gives blue physical volume and presence.
Read Whanki and Klein from the SFMOMA magazine :
-What is blue doing?
-Stand where you can see Whanki and Klein's works. How do they relate to the room? To the other works?
-Does your attention go to the material that supports the color?
-If you took blue out of every work, what would remain? What role does blue serve?
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