Lot 64 Dα

"I discovered the water drop one morning after working at night. Quite dissatisfied with myself, I had splashed some water with my hands on the back of the canvases. And I noticed that the water drops stayed there and were shining on the canvas. It was extraordinary. I thought: that's what I have to do. I wondered if I could make art out of this. At that time, I wanted to break away from the experience of the war. When I discovered the water drop, I thought I had found a playing ground that could be my own. It also reconnected me back to eastern philosophies like Taoism and Zen Buddhism. My first show at Knoll International was very well received. Poet Alain Bosquet wrote a very good review in the newspaper, Combat and a lot of people came, including Salvador Dali, who wrote in the guestbook, cela égale en magnificence la Gare de Perpignan-this equals in magnificence the train station of Perpignan!" (Kim Tschang-Yeul: Art Without Ego, Ocula Magazine Conversation, Vivian Chui, New York 2019, <https://ocula.com/magazine/conversations/kim-tschang-yeul/>)

Kim Tschang-Yeul is one of the most important Korean artists, alongside Nam June Paik. Born in North Korea in 1929, Kim Tschang-Yeul was initiated into the art of calligraphy by his grandfather when he was only a child and studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Seoul until the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. To overcome the traumatic experiences of the war, he moved to New York in the late 1960s where he was influenced by American Expressionism and especially by Mark Rothko's atmospheric colour field paintings. 1970 was to become a decisive year for the artist, as it marked his move to Paris where he met his wife, Martine Gillon, and where he developed the dominant theme of his art - his famous drops of water (see Philippe Sergeant, Kim Tschang-Yeul, Paris 2008, p.289/297). Since then Kim has worked on each subject with an untiring tenacity. Sometimes this meant covering an entire canvas with a sea of drops, while sometimes he focused purely on the hyper-realistic depiction of a single drop. Yet his works always oscillates between trompe l'oeil and still life and can therefore never be assigned to a specific genre.