Mon, Apr 20, 2026 page5

• S Korean chainsaw artist Kim Yun Shin carves name at 91

  • AFP, PAJU, South Korea
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  South Korean sculptor Kim Yun Shin wields a chainsaw with a quiet focus, refining a craft the 91-year-old has honed over decades spent far from home.

  Long overlooked in her home country, Kim has more recently gained recognition as a pioneering artist, featuring in a sweeping retrospective at South Korea’s esteemed Hoam Museum of Art.

  The solo exhibition, titled “Two Be One,” is the institution’s first since its founding in 1982 to spotlight a female artist, and includes some of her signature abstract sculptures hewn from hardwood with her tool of choice.

  

  South Korean sculptor Kim Yun Shin still wields a chainsaw with quiet focus, refining a craft she honed over decades spent far away from home.

  Photo: AFP

  “The saw is my body,” Kim said in her studio in Paju, northwest of Seoul. “When I lift it and cut [the wood], it has to move exactly like me — the saw has to become me, and I have to become the saw.”

  Hoam is exhibiting about 170 of Kim’s sculptures and paintings, reflecting her reverence for nature and blending spirituality with meditations on existence, material and form.

  Born in 1935 in Wonsan, Kim grew up in the countryside, talking to trees and rice paddies, and making eyeglasses out of sorghum stalks.

  At the time, Korea was under Japanese colonial rule. Kim saw her older brother disappear after joining the independence movement, and pine trees in her town cut down for fuel.

  “Those trees were my friends,” she said, recalling the pain of seeing them uprooted — and her drive to salvage and transform them into works of sculpture.

  “I think I wanted them to endure — to keep living on within that [art] form. Maybe that’s why I’ve loved working with wood so much,” she added.

  Kim’s family fled south during the horrors of the Korean War, and she later studied in France before returning to become an art professor in Seoul.

  South Korea was then under a brutal military dictatorship. Authorities held artists in suspicion: A friend of Kim’s was interrogated for using red, a color associated with North Korean communism.

  “Women, in particular, were virtually invisible,” she said.

  At 48, drawn by the abundant trees in Argentina, she moved to the South American nation. She ended up staying for 40 years, taking up chainsaw carving.

  Kim focused on dense, durable wood such as palo santo and “algarrobo,” and worked with quarries in Mexico and Brazil, experimenting with stone sculpture using materials such as onyx and sodalite.

  Kim managed to forge her “own artistic world, nourished by the country’s culture and nature,” Hoam senior curator Tae Hyun-sun said.

  Like many women artists of her generation, Kim has only recently gained global recognition, said Rachel Lehmann, cofounder of Lehmann Maupin, which represents Kim internationally.

  “Her perseverance and lifelong dedication have helped pave the way for subsequent generations of women artists,” she added.

  Kim returned to South Korea after a major 2023 solo show in Seoul that propelled her to the Venice Biennale the following year.

  At 15, Kim, who was a war refugee, changed her name to Yun Shin — “truth and faith” — on the advice of a monk who urged her to spend her life discovering her “true color.”

  Those words have always “stayed vivid with me,” she said. “Sometimes I feel they are what have carried me through this life.”
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