Exhibition Information

2024 131 × 182 cm

2024 90 × 130 cm

2023 199 × 143 cm

			Gallery Hyundai presents Minjung Kim’s solo exhibition One after the Other from August 27 through October 19, 2025. For over thirty years, Kim has explored the traditions of East Asian calligraphy and ink painting alongside Eastern philosophy, expanding the formal vocabulary of contemporary abstraction. This exhibition is her third solo presentation with Gallery Hyundai, following Paper, Ink and Fire: After the Process (2017) and Timeless (2021). It also marks her first solo show in Korea since the successful presentation of Mountain in 2024 at Fondation Maeght in St. Paul de Vence, one of Europe’s most prestigious institutions for contemporary art. One after the Other will feature ten works from Kim’s recent series, Zip, presented for the first time in Korea. In these pieces, layers of scorched Hanji (traditional Korean paper) are stacked in a zigzag formation, embodying the union and harmony of two distinct elements. The exhibition will also include around thirty works spanning the artist’s major series, offering a concentrated reflection on Kim’s long-standing inquiry into materiality, repetition, and accidentality, articulated through the meditative acts of burning and layering.

Minjung Kim works with the most fundamental of materials: paper, ink, and fire. This restraint palette requires intense discipline and focus, often sustained over hours or even days—a process the artist likens to “a path toward a spiritual state.” For Kim, Hanji is both pigment and pictorial subject, as well as a site for meditative ritual. Shaped by the intuitive lines drawn by flame and built through the rhythmic accumulation of scorched layers, her works invite viewers into a quiet space of emotional resonance and reflection. Furthermore, Kim engages in a collaboration with fire—carefully burning paper, one of humanity’s most delicate material, by precisely controlling the movement of a candle. Through this act, she contemplates the cyclical nature of life and the concept of emptiness. By employing fire in an experimental manner, she accelerates the disintegration of this fragile material, exploring the boundaries between material and immaterial, form and formlessness, while visually articulating the passage of time and space.