• Ideas
  • Nov 10, 2017

Still Valid: Interview with Kim Yong-Ik

KIM YONG-IK. Photo by Keith Park. Courtesy Spike Island, Bristol.

Kim Yong-Ik is known as the artist who sought to define his own trajectory beyond the two movements that dominated South Korean artistic thought throughout the 1980s—Dansaekhwa (“monochrome” painting) and the opposing, populist Minjung misul (“people’s art”). Kim was also an activist who protested Park Chung-Hee’s dictatorship in the 1960s and in 2011, he published a book titled “Why Do I Art? – How the Political is Connected to the Conceptual.” His illustrious artistic career, which spans 40 years, is being introduced to UK audiences for the first time through a two-part retrospective at Spike Island, Bristol, and London’s Korean Cultural Centre. The exhibitions reflect the artist’s renegade qualities, wry humor and commitment to contradicting others as well as himself. He rebels with the conventions of art, often changing his paintings on a whim and encouraging audiences to walk all over his work. ArtAsiaPacific spoke to Kim on the occasion of the landmark exhibition about the evolution of his practice.