Johyun Gallery is pleased to present “Where Threads Breathe,” a solo exhibition of Kim Hong-Seuk from June 11 to August 2, 2026. Kim developed a distinctive visual language of his own, and this exhibition marks Johyun Gallery’s first presentation dedicated to revisiting his practice, which deserves renewed attention within the history of Korean contemporary art and the trajectory of Dansaekhwa (monochrome painting). Centered on the Opening and Shutting and Germination series, the exhibition explores the artist’s painterly experiments created through the interplay of canvas, thread, and hanji paper.

Kim Hong-Seuk, based primarily in Busan, developed his formal language within the broader current of monochrome painting that shaped Korean modernism. Working with thread, hanji, and ink in place of conventional painting materials, he composed achromatic, monochromatic surfaces informed by the East Asian compositional principle of yeobaek. The bringing-together of thread, hanji , and canvas in his work does not seek to represent or present some completed form; rather, it holds the force and tension of a state not yet disclosed, and the process of becoming. What he seeks through this practice, is to contain within his work the breath and han of the ancestors who once stood on the ground where he now stands.

Kim Hong-Seuk’s surfaces are not empty, static spaces but fields through which energies and emotions flow. Built up through repetitive action using thread and hanji, the surface holds a latent force beneath it in delicate oscillation. This state of stillness-in-motion evokes the breath and han accumulated from the lives and labor of his forebearers, all that Kim sought to bring into his work. They are not punctual expressions but durative ones with condensation and endurance, with an ongoing life-rhythm within the current of change and becoming. This exhibition focuses on two series within Kim’s practice, and Germination, tracing the reverberating malerisch states that pervade his lyrical surfaces as they hold within them the processes of transformation and becoming.

The Opening and Shutting series disclose the latent state of the surface in its most condensed form. Pliable and docile, the thread at times clusters to form concentrated nodes of force; though its materiality tends toward the lithe and is easy to fray, repetition and alignment produce a calibrated order. The covalence of contrary properties yields a metastable surface: closed yet holding the potential to open, appearing still yet sustaining fine movement and tension within. The repeated strata and traces left by the thread render the boundary between interior and exterior, disclosure and concealment, semi-permeable and in constant flux, presenting the surface not as completed form but as a field of stored potential prior to becoming, a space of felt intensity.

The Germination series submits the material properties of hanji and thread to more direct activation. Hanji is layered over the threaded surface and then torn away, a repeated cycle of lamination and delamination through which Kim Hong-Seuk converted the traces of separation into the formal language of the picture plane. Force latent within the surface is disclosed outward through the topography of removal: fissures and ridges in the hanji, extruded surfaces, the residual imprint of thread. The soft substrate and the shear lines scored across it are in covalent tension, each penetrating the boundary between interior and exterior, holding the threshold between emergence and dissolution in suspension. Through these repeated cycles, the Germination series converts the picture plane into a tactile, vibrating field of becoming.

As the Opening and Shutting and Germination series attest, Kim Hong-Seuk’s practice privileges the incipient over the resolved: not the articulation of completed form or determinate meaning, but the nascent sensations and affective stirrings that arise within the flux of becoming. This exhibition traces the tension of states not yet precipitated and the emergent movements within them, attending to the quiet vibration and affective currents that suffuse Kim Hong-Seuk’s painting. Before these reticent, lyrical surfaces where canvas, thread, and hanji converge, one may apprehend the breath and resonance accreted across sustained duration, and in that stillness, the sense of han that subsists within.

Venue
171 Dalmaji-gil 65beon-gil, Haeundae-gu, Busan, South Korea

Artists
Kim Hong-Seuk

Exhibition Dates
June 11 – August 2, 2026

Gallery Hours
Tuesday – Sunday | 10: 30 AM – 6: 30 PM

Website
https://www.johyungallery.com/

Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/johyungallery/

Contact
press@johyungallery.com

About the Artist

Kim Hong-Seuk (金洪錫, 1935-1993) worked by repeatedly weaving and fixing thread onto canvas, a method through which he sought to re-examine the structural conditions of the picture plane within the broader development of Korean abstract art in the 1970s. Taking up a needle in place of a brush, and sewing thread instead of applying paint, he orchestrated a surface on which thread and canvas share an equivalent materiality. Against a restrained monochrome ground, the thread at times recedes into the weave and at other times stands in relief, generating a distinctive pictorial tension. The traces of thread accumulated through repeated action reveal the physical strata of time as a structure integrated within the picture plane. Cutting thread to uniform lengths aligned with the grain of the canvas, then drawing each strand up through from back to front, one by one, is an arduous process of manual labor. Through that process, the surface takes on an abstract formal character while the material traces accumulated at the fingertips coalesce into a texture that feels almost tangible, rather than a conceptual void. This sculptural thinking is made most legible in the Gaepye (開閉 – “Opening and Shutting”) series, where thread arranged systematically across the surface is tense between openness and closure. His thread works, at times scattering into pointillist fields and at times flowing as lines, arrive in Danggan (幢竿 – “Banner Pole”) at a contrast between densely packed structure and negative space. These varied formal shifts all originate from a single action: the repetition of sewing thread.

Kim Hong-Seuk began solo exhibitions in Busan and Seoul in the early 1970s, and expanded his activity in the 1980s to Tokyo, Hiroshima, Paris, New Delhi, Washington D.C., and Tennessee. His solo exhibitions at the Rotunda Gallery and Oak Ridge Art Center (Tennessee) in 1982, at the Lalit Kala Akademi (India) in 1985, and at the Korean Cultural Center in Paris in 1986 demonstrate that his work was introduced across a constellation of exhibitions spanning Asia, North America, and Europe. He participated in the 13th São Paulo Biennale (1975), the Fourth India Triennale (1978), the Kyoto International Impact Art Festival (1980), and the traveling exhibition Korean Drawing Now organized in collaboration with the Brooklyn Museum (1981–84). His international profile was cemented by his receipt of the Grand Prize in painting at the Fourth India Triennale. Domestically, he participated in exhibitions including the École de Séoul and Korean Art Today: Black and White, contributing to the development of Korean modernism in the 1970s and 80s. His works are held in major public collections in Korea and abroad, including the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA) and the Ho-Am Art Museum.

(Text and images courtesy of Johyun Gallery)