The Kim Dal-jin Art Research and Museum in Jongno-gu, Seoul, will present "Kim Jin-yeol Archive: Rise, Uphold, Embrace" from July 13 to Aug. 14. Rather than treating Kim Jin-yeol's body of work as a sequence of chronological achievements, the exhibition traces how life, place, material and memory have converged into a single sculptural language.
Kim has long favored cutting, tearing and layering over the refined forms of modernism, using rough shapes and dense materiality to expose the pressures of his era and the wounds of the human condition. After relocating to Wonju, he turned his attention to those left behind by the pace of industrialization — bodies worn down by waiting, and people who nonetheless press on with their lives.
Through the artist's practice, the exhibition illuminates how people and nature, labor and memory, material and community remain bound together, inviting reflection on the sensibility of lived experience and the ethics of art.
By Lee Seung-hyun, Herald Art Day curator
info@artday.co.kr
