To Them, with Honor: Jungmyung KIM Solo Exhibition

To Them, With Honor – An Artistic Lineage Reborn from Fragments

Born in Busan in 1945, Kim Jung Myung has shaped a significant trajectory within Korean contemporary art for more than half a century. Early on, he adopted boundary-crossing experimentation—moving freely between painting, sculpture, objects, and installation—as his core artistic language. Beginning with the Scrap and Red (Bbal) series of the mid-1970s, and continuing through Frame and Canvas, Calendar, Book, Finger, Dinosaur, Tongue, Bone, Pocket, Speech Bubble, and Big Head, Kim has constructed a visual world that navigates the space between everyday objects, cartoon-like symbols, history and myth, education and play. His work consistently poses the subtle yet incisive question: How do we perceive, speak about, and remember the world?

Having studied sculpture at Hongik University and art education at Keimyung University, Kim served as a professor at Pusan National University from 1982 to 2008. His decades as an artist, educator, and researcher have accumulated into the layered conceptual depth found throughout his oeuvre. This solo exhibition, To Them, With Honor, highlights the most recent chapters of his artistic path—Artistic DNA (2021– ) and To Them, With Honor (2023– )—presenting his painting, sculptural, and installation works together. Rooted in his long-held belief that “painting ultimately reflects the spirit of its time” and that one must “never become the same as others,” this exhibition signifies the artist’s desire to situate his practice within a broader lineage of art history.

Artistic DNA Found in Broken Paint

The starting point of this exhibition unexpectedly emerged from what could be called an accident. One day, a large acrylic work fell and shattered. Looking into the fragments, the artist recalled traces of Kandinsky, Pollock, Matisse, Picasso, and Monet. He describes seeing “the DNA of artists” in the tiny paint chips—no longer mere debris, but “precious jewels of spirit” embodying condensed histories of aesthetics, experimentation, and failure.

The Artistic DNA series (2021– ) begins precisely here. By attaching heads and tails to paint fragments and arranging them to float like living organisms on glass, Kim transcends material manipulation, visually articulating the idea that art can be reborn into another life. The paint is no longer a tool for making a painting, but a being that speaks in its own form. As he states, these fragments become “priceless jewels of spirit.”

This attitude resonates with the civilizational critique embedded throughout Kim’s earlier works. In series such as Book, Finger, Speech Bubble, and Big Head, he has illuminated the emptiness and tension produced by an excess of knowledge, information, and imagery. In Artistic DNA, the critical perspective condenses into the form of “fragments,” from which a new generative energy emerges—offering his most fundamental answer to the question: What comes after critique?

Dialogue with Masterpieces: To Them, With Honor

Beginning in 2021, the Energy Communion series introduced a method of wrinkling printed masterpieces to create relief-like surfaces, overlaying them with glass, and allowing paint to flow across and beneath these layers. Rather than reproducing or parodying the originals, Kim sought to construct a site where images and materials collide, forming tension and communion across time.

To Them, With Honor (2023– ) intensifies this approach. Portraits, works, and symbolic elements from Warhol, Basquiat, Picasso, Monet, and Manet merge with Kim’s own color sensibility, forms, and the energetic materiality of paint fragments to generate a new kind of sculptural painting.

Recalling the portraits of saints and sages that hung in his childhood home, along with the musicians and writers whose images covered his room during his youth, the artist asks:
“Why did I never display the images of the artists who influenced me the most?”
His lifelong insistence on originality and aversion to imitation once made such gestures impossible. Yet now, beyond the distancing of his younger years, he acknowledges a sense of “debt” and “gratitude”—a realization that forms the foundation of this series. It is not simple homage, but a declaration that “I, too, stand at one end of this lineage,” and an admission that art lives only through relationships with others.

Kim often tells his students that one must see the world where “horizontal and vertical thinking intersect.” If horizontal thinking reflects contemporary visual culture and lived context, vertical thinking refers to the deeper axis of art history, intellectual history, and philosophy. This exhibition captures the rare moment where these two axes meet.

Fragments and masterpieces, paint and printed images, historical figures and present viewers, flatness and dimensionality continually intersect. Positioned as a mediator linking past, present, and future, the artist asks how the energy of art can be carried forward. In this sense, the exhibition is retrospective, current, and forward-looking all at once. Here, “honor” is not simply a gesture toward the past, but a declaration of the creative act itself—lifting fragments to give them new life.

Conclusion

Rooted in Busan yet reaching across eras and disciplines, Kim Jung Myung reveals in this exhibition the private lineage of predecessors, mentors, and contemporaries who have shaped his artistic language. To Them, With Honor is both a bow to the past and a question toward the future. What should art inherit, what should it abandon, and what must it newly generate? Just as the artist discovered in the fragments of paint, perhaps within the most ordinary remnants lie dormant artistic DNA. This exhibition seeks to awaken those hidden strands and invites each of us to reconsider: To whom do we offer our honor?