KIM YUN SHIN

1935 - Still living

A pioneering sculptor whose carved forms hold division and joining in the same body.

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Kim Yun Shin has spent nearly seven decades asking what happens when an artist meets a material without trying to overpower it. Born in Wonsan in 1935, she became part of South Korea’s first generation of women sculptors, studied in Paris, and later left an established teaching career for Argentina, where vast landscapes and dense hardwoods changed the way she worked.

She is best known for wood sculptures cut with a chainsaw and gathered under one lifelong title: Add Two Add One, Divide Two Divide One. The phrase describes a cycle in which separate things join, become one, and divide again. It is both an idea and a working method. Kim follows the grain, bark, weight, and resistance of each piece, leaving cuts that can resemble joints, wounds, branches, architecture, or bodies. Her work entered the Venice Biennale in 2024 and received its most comprehensive museum survey in 2026. The simplest doorway remains the work itself: begin with a cut, then notice what it separates and what it binds together.

What was happening in the world while they were becoming an artist? Explore the history.

Ways Into Kim's Work, located in the room called Passion

Begin with the cut.
Where has the wood been sliced deeply, grazed lightly, or marked again and again? Notice whether the cuts feel abrupt, measured, rhythmic, or improvised.

Look for the join.
Find the places where separate masses lean together, stack, interlock, or appear to hold one another upright. Does the form feel stable, precarious, or somewhere between?

Let the form change identity.
A sculpture may suggest a tree, a body, a building, a tool, or an unfamiliar creature. Try not to settle on one answer too quickly.

Notice what the wood keeps.
Look for bark, knots, grain, cracks, and irregular edges. Where has Kim transformed the material, and where has she allowed it to remain visibly itself?

Track the rhythm.
In both sculpture and painting, repeated grooves, blocks, stripes, and gestures create movement. Follow one pattern until it changes direction or breaks apart.

Use your body as scale.
Imagine standing beside the work. Would you look down at it, meet it at eye level, or have to move around it to understand how its parts connect?

Looking Now, Looking Later:

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:
-Walk around the sculpture once before settling on a favorite view. What changes as the form opens, closes, and shifts against the space around it?
-Choose one repeated feature: a notch, cut, block, opening, or line. Where does the repetition stay steady, and where does it begin to change?
-Find one place that feels grown and another that feels constructed. What happens where those qualities meet?
-Look closely at the wood itself. Where does the material seem to guide the form, and where does Kim Yun Shin seem to push against it?

Looking later:
-Which stays with you more strongly: the overall silhouette, the wood, the cuts, or the spaces between them?
-Do you remember the sculpture as something solid, something open, or both?
-What part of the work became more vivid in memory after you walked away?
-As you move through the exhibition, notice another work where the material seems to have a voice in what the artwork becomes.

In Conversation: Kim Yun Shin & Ruth Asawa

RM owns Add Two Add One, Divide Two Divide One 2015-9 and his piece is paired directly with one by Ruth Asawa, a beloved San Francisco artist who had her own retrospective at SFMOMA last year.

Ruth Asawa (1926–2013) was a San Francisco artist best known for sculptures that transform wire into intricate, often organic forms. Nature was a constant source of attention for her: plants, branches, growth patterns, and the spaces between forms all found their way into her work.

Asawa was also deeply interested in what a material could do. Rather than hiding wire’s qualities, she bent, looped, and tied it into structures that depend as much on openness and shadow as on solid form.

Placed beside Kim Yun Shin’s carved wood sculpture, Asawa’s work offers another way of thinking about what can happen when an artist pays close attention to nature and allows the character of a material to help shape the work.

Looking now:
-Stand where you can hold both sculptures in your field of vision. Before comparing them, notice what happens in the space between them. How does that space feel?
-Kim Yun Shin begins with something solid and cuts into it. Ruth Asawa builds volume from wire and air. At what point does subtraction begin to feel like making, and emptiness begin to feel like material?
-Imagine that each artist encountered a form in nature that made her stop. What might each of them have been paying attention to?
-Look at one sculpture through the other. Does either work give you a new way to see the second?
-Neither sculpture asks you to stand still. Walk around them. Where do you feel the work changing because you changed position?
-The co-curators chose to place these works in conversation. What question do you think one sculpture might be asking the other?
-What question does the pairing ask you?

Looking later:
-Without looking at an image, try to reconstruct both sculptures in your mind. What did memory keep, and what did it discard
-Which space do you remember more clearly: the material of the sculptures or the air they shaped?
-Did the pairing make you think differently about what it means to make something from nature without representing nature?
-If these two works continue a conversation after you leave the room, what do you imagine remains unresolved?

Kim's Life:

A childhood marked by rupture
Kim was born in Wonsan, in present-day North Korea, in 1935. Her family later resettled in Seoul amid the upheavals of partition and the Korean War. That history should not be used as a shortcut for interpreting every sculpture, but movement, separation, and rebuilding formed the landscape of her early life.

Making room for women in sculpture
Kim trained at Hongik University and studied at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1964 to 1969. In 1974, she co-founded the Korean Sculptress Association, creating professional support for women entering a field still dominated by men.

She left stability for trees
In 1984, Kim left her teaching career and established life in Seoul after encountering Argentina’s immense landscapes and hardwood trees. The wood was not a picturesque backdrop. Its density demanded new tools, greater physical force, and a more direct method of carving. Ocula

The chainsaw is not simply an emblem of strength
Kim studies a piece of wood before beginning. She has described waiting for her own state and the wood’s condition to align, particularly because working with a chainsaw requires balance among body, machine, and material. The tool’s speed matters, but so do attention and restraint.

Recognition arrived late
A 2023 Seoul museum survey helped bring Kim’s work to renewed international attention. Eight sculptures then appeared in the main exhibition of the 2024 Venice Biennale, followed by her first commercial-gallery representation after nearly seven decades of work and a major 170-work retrospective at Hoam Museum of Art in 2026.

A shelf full of turtles
Kim’s studio also holds turtle figures collected from friends and family across her travels. She has said she loves turtles for their longevity and would like to live forever herself. It is a small detail, but one that fits an artist in her tenth decade who continues to approach her career as unfinished business.

GO DEEPER: WATCH

Hoam Museum of Art’s official interview, produced in connection with the 2026 retrospective, offers the most direct route into Kim’s own account of her life and practice.

GO DEEPER: WATCH

Frieze Masters 2024
A compact visual introduction to her sculpture, painting, chainsaw process, Argentine materials, and return to working in Korea. It connects directly to her Frieze Masters studio presentation.

GO DEEPER: READ/EXPLORE

Leeum Museum of Art리움미술관 홈페이지입니다.

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