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.
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.”
A US YouTuber who caused outrage for filming himself kissing a statue commemorating Korean wartime sex slaves has been sentenced to six months in prison, a court in Seoul said yesterday. Johnny Somali, 25, gained notoriety several years ago for recording himself doing a series of provocative stunts in South Korea and Japan, and streaming them on platforms such as YouTube and Twitch. South Korean authorities indicted Somali — whose real name is Ramsey Khalid Ismael — in 2024 on public order violations and obstruction of business, and banned him from leaving the country. “The court has sentenced him to six months in
Former Lima mayor Rafael Lopez Aliaga, a Peruvian presidential hopeful, gathered hundreds of supporters in Lima on Tuesday and gave authorities 24 hours to annul the first round of the country’s election over allegations of fraud. Lopez Aliaga is locked in a tight three-way race with two other candidates for second place in Sunday’s vote. The election runner-up wins a ticket to June’s presidential run-off against front-runner Keiko Fujimori. “I am giving them 24 hours to declare this electoral fraud null and void,” said Lopez Aliaga, surrounded by a crowd of several hundred supporters. “If it is not declared null and void tomorrow,
PAPAL RETORT: Pope Leo told reporters that he has ‘no fear, neither of the Trump administration nor speaking out loudly about the message of the Gospel’ US President Donald Trump has feuded with Pope Leo XIV over the Iran conflict — setting off an unholy row that could have serious political implications for the Republican leader back in the US. Trump has drawn barbs even from some allies over the attacks on the US-born pontiff, who has criticized the Trump administration over its immigration crackdown, the intervention in Venezuela and the Iran war. The president risks alienating the religious right in November’s crucial US midterm elections. So far the unprecedented clash between the leader of the most powerful military on Earth and the head of the world’s 1.4 billion
A 16-year-old boy has been charged with murder and aggravated sexual abuse in Florida in the death of his 18-year-old stepsister on a Carnival Cruise ship, the US Department of Justice said on Monday. Timothy Hudson was initially charged in February and subsequently indicted on March 10, but the breadth of the case was not known until a seal was lifted on Friday last week, weeks after US District Judge Beth Bloom in Miami said that he would be prosecuted as an adult at the request of the government. Anna Kepner had been traveling on the Carnival Horizon ship in November last
RSS