Johyun Gallery is pleased to present As It Is, a solo exhibition by painter Kim Taek Sang, on view from August 26 through November 8, 2026. Presented simultaneously across Johyun Gallery_Dalmaji, Johyun Gallery_Haeundae, and Johyun Gallery_Seoul, the exhibition brings together more than 50 works, including the artist’s new Ice Blossom series, a new large-scale painting, and a video installation work.

Kim Taek Sang has pursued a painterly inquiry mediated by water and pigment for over thirty years. He received his B.F.A. in Painting from Chung-Ang University and his M.F.A. in Western Painting from Hongik University. After a long career teaching and mentoring future generations at Cheongju University, he retired in 2020 and has since fully devoted himself to his practice. Over the decades, Kim has cultivated a singular visual methodology that harmonizes nature’s autonomous generative processes with pictorial materiality. As water and pigment diffuse, dry, and deposit in layers over the canvas following the rhythm of the seasons, his work operates through an ethos of relinquishing human agency. This methodology is the expression of Kim’s rigorous painterly practice, embracing natural shifts not as passive subjects, but as active partners in mutual coexistence, respecting their singular rhythms and durations.

Kim Taek Sang’s signature series—Breathing, Flows, and Resonance—embody the temporality of spring, summer, and autumn, respectively. The Ice Blossom series, unveiled for the first time in this exhibition, expands his artistic domain into winter. The artist states that the fourth season had previously been inaccessible due to environmental constraints. While earlier works focused on the fluid movement and evaporation of water, this new body of work illuminates the trajectories of crystallization formed through thermal shifts and freezing. As water and pigment repeatedly freeze under sub-zero temperatures and thaw, the “ice blossoms” on the canvas become crystalized denials of all artificial intervention, standing as pure products of nature’s self-forging process. By welcoming winter into his practice, Kim brings to fruition his long ascetic journey across the seasons, settling the full resonance of time embodied by water and pigment onto the canvas.

Furthermore, the exhibition introduces three innovative formats that expand Kim Taek Sang’s artistic vocabulary across the gallery’s three locations. At Johyun Gallery_Dalmaji, the moving-image work There utilizes ultra-microscopic photography to reveal the hidden interior life of his canvases, translating the subtle movement of minute pigment particles floating between layered strata into a dynamic visual experience. Meanwhile, Johyun Gallery_Haeundae showcases Non-linearity, a key piece within his winter series that highlights the organic, white crystalline lines generated by freezing temperatures, introducing a formal language distinct from his earlier fluid gestures. Unifying these site-specific presentations across all three venues are five monumental paintings, each expanding to over ten meters in scale to capture the multi-faceted variations of water within a single, continuous breath. Far from attempting to master natural phenomena, these new works intensify Kim’s defining ethos: a radical surrender of artistic agency that allows the medium to self-manifest.

Beneath the quiet surfaces of Kim Taek Sang’s practice lies a sharp engagement with the contemporary zeitgeist. Often categorized within Post-Dansaekhwa or abstract painting, his work moves beyond mere formal aesthetics to offer a phenomenological inquiry into intangible time condensed within matter. In an era where rapid advancements in artificial intelligence outsource even the most routine decisions to machines, Kim’s persistent commitment to analog waiting stands as an intentional act of resistance, reasserting the value of temporal stillness in an age of algorithmic acceleration.

This posture embodies an “aesthetics of non-egoic emergence”—a deliberate surrender of artistic intent that allows the canvas to become of its own self-so-ness, setting his practice apart from the formal reductionism of Western Minimalism or Monochrome. His performative patience in awaiting the artwork’s course of taking up its own patterns, paired with an ecological reverence for nature’s intrinsic state, cuts through an age obsessed with hyper-density, efficiency, and control. By restoring our shared rhythm with the natural world, As It Is reaffirms the aesthetic necessity and timely resonance of Kim Taek Sang’s painting.

Venue
Johyun Gallery_Dalmaji, 171 Dalmaji-gil 65 beongil, Haeundae-gu, Busan, South Korea 
Johyun Gallery_Haeundae, 5 Haeundaehaebyeon-ro 298 Beon-gil
Johyun Gallery_Seoul, B1 The Shilla, 249 Dongho-ro, Jung-gu, Seoul, South Korea 04605 

Artists
Kim Taek Sang

Exhibition Dates
25 Aug – 8 Nov 2026

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

Website
https://www.johyungallery.com

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

Contact
info@johyungallery.com

About the Artist

Kim Take Sang (b.1958)  https://www.johyungallery.com/artists/76-kim-taek-sang/overview/

Kim Taek Sang has been experimenting with the diffusion, sedimentation, and layering of color for over three decades through the medium of water. His process is iterative—mixing trace amounts of pigment into water, pouring the solution onto a canvas laid flat, then allowing it to dry. Repeated dozens of times, this practice is both ascetic and curative; he has come to describe it as the aesthetics of care. This delicate layering of sediment on canvas creates subtle interstices that scatter light and permeate the surface with depth and density, evoking nature’s own palette of serene and understated hues. Kim describes his creations as dàamhwa (淡畵 – dàam painting), where dàam carries meanings of clear, delicate, faint, or thin in tint.

Kim’s earliest works in the early 1990s contained commentaries on socio-political issues, but he experienced an artistic turning point when he was captivated by the prismatic waters of the Yellowstone Caldera. Through this encounter, he began incorporating natural elements—water, air, light, and gravity—into his studio practice, developing a distinctive visual language that bridges materiality and the senses, concept and nature. Kim’s works avoid overt contrasts, favoring elusive similarities, subtle oscillations, and minute pulses of light. While his work is discussed within the lineage of Dansaekhwa, his practice stands apart, reflecting a deeply personal exploration of the relationships between nature, humanity, medium, and perception.

Kim holds a B.F.A. in Painting from Chungang University and an M.F.A. in Western Painting from Hongik University. His works are included in the collections of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), Korea; Kumho Museum of Art; Leeum Museum of Art; and Suwon I’Park Museum of Art.

(Text and images courtesy of Johyun Gallery)