Hermitage: Chinwook Kim
Full Emptiness
Lee Sun Young (Art Critic)
In Chinwook Kim’s work, shapes exist within other shapes. His densely packed canvases feel like a dynamic game of hide-and-seek, where elements appear and vanish in constant motion. Whether seen as cells, bubbles or whirlpools, within them arise or disappear other cells, bubbles or whirlpools. The flow of these small, repeating units, splitting and merging, creates a striking, almost overwhelming effect. Because he fills in the details moment by moment based on intuition rather than planning every unit in advance, these structures are more than decorative patterns. Yet the images, “built like bricks”, occupy a space between artist and craftsman.
The “brick” metaphor points to the idea of isomorphism underlying his work. As Douglas Hofstadter explains in 『Gödel, Escher, Bach』, isomorphism is a form that preserves original information even as it transforms. Similarly, in Kim’s work, the structural similarity between parts remains even when flipped, reversed, shortened, or enlarged.
Though his work draws on meticulous ink-based drawing and on styles he explored during long studies in Germany and England, it also reflects his background in Eastern painting from his undergraduate studies in Korea. The repeating units don’t mechanically fill space; their merging and dividing create different narratives or symbolic meanings. Circles of varying sizes and colours serve as the basic units of his compositions. The circle, the simplest geometric form, acts as a reference for subsequent transformations. Across cultures, the circle has often symbolized the self – Plato, for example, likened the mind to a sphere. In Kim’s work, circles often appear as black moons. Large circles etched with terrain-like surfaces exert a powerful influence over the more fluid, transformative elements around them.
As Eastern cultures, which followed the lunar calendar, intuited, and as modern physics, represented by Newton, revealed, the motion that creates the rise and fall of ocean tides originates from the moon. In Jinwook Kim’s work, the black moon sometimes acts like a black hold, guiding the flow of the composition. Circles and their transformations link together like a chain of existence.
Arthur Lovejoy, in 『The Great Chain of Being』, described the idea of a hierarchical chain of existence: from the smallest, nearly non-existent entities through every possible stage, up to fully realized beings, forming an infinite series of links. Rooted in nature, Kim’s work carries this sense of “the excellent connection of being that nature shows us”, as Thomas Aquinas put it. This 18th-century idea celebrates the fullness of the world.
According to Arthur Lovejoy’s concept 『The Great Chain of Being』, fullness can be understood as the idea that the world, once empty and void before divine revelation, is now filled with divine light and grace, so the earth is no longer empty. Yet even in a nature believed to be teeming with life, there remains an underlying fear of vacuum and emptiness. In Chinwook Kim’s work, the world of fullness carries this opposite aspect; it holds the anxiety of emptiness. This echoes the way Pascal expressed modern unease when faced with the eternal silence of infinite space, a fear that arose as theological certainties began to wane. The interconnected, animistic or pantheistic view of the world, where everything is linked, was later transformed by Romanticism and often reemerged whenever the human experience of the world felt cold and void. In his 2017 exhibition 《Empty》, Kim described such a networked world as being like Indra’s net from the Buddhist Avatamsaka Sutra, with everything interwoven and reflective, like transparent jewels suspended in a web.
Much like Leibniz’s monads, which Lovejoy identified as the clearest philosophical example of the Great Chain of Being, this chain in Kim’s work is made up of circles and their transformations. In works such as Inside and outside of landscape-horns, circles may sprout new forms or shed parts of themselves, transforming from one piece to the next. Choices about whether a circle is black, white, or an oval are connected to the branching narratives unfolding across the canvas. Kim approaches these compositions like a player in an endlessly unfolding game, exploring variations with a few elements. What emerges through the viewer’s gaze represents birth. The small, subtle units; atoms, microbes, air, that pervade the world move delicately across the canvas, producing a striking visual of creation and destruction, of a universe in constant flux.
In a world filled with flowing, organic curves, the few straight elements, such as vertical lines or the horizon, frame the relationship between reality and potential. What the artist hides in the composition remains potential until discovered and made real. The work itself is a continual back-and-forth between potentially and actuality. Far from literal representation, his paintings embody what Deleuze called “repetition with difference” rather than mechanical recurrence. This kind of repetition points simultaneously to birth or replication, and to evolution, or transformation.
Through this two-way movement, Kim brings a sense of latent motion into the otherwise still medium of painting. Just as the unconscious rises into consciousness, the potential emerges into reality. His dynamic compositions do not fix surface and depth; either can shift position at any moment. He sometimes curls the edges of the canvas, suggesting a space defined only by surface. This treatment of the surface introduces a sense of infinity into a finite three-dimensional volume, allowing the world of the painting to feel both bounded and limitless at once.
As seen in Inside and Outside of Landscape - Lake, one of the flows of morphemes takes the form of a complex, winding strand. This strand generates dynamic movement across multiple works. Its undulating curves, reminiscent of Art Nouveau, also evoke modern physics’ hypothesis that the universe is fundamentally composed of strings. Crossing multiple scales, Kim’s work can be understood as a cosmic landscape. Margaret Wertheim, in 『The Pealy Gates of Cyberspace』, describes a model of vast “cosmic strings” scattered throughout the universe; immense strands and plates of condensed gravity that bend the spatial structure between galaxies. Such space behaves like a relativistic ocean, continuously reshaped by massive, flowing four-dimensional surfaces where waves, currents, and whirlpools, akin to seas between stars, surge and twist. Wertheim notes that sailors navigating this cosmic ocean must understand the surface of the turbulent waters.
In Kim’s work, large and small openings allow journeys not only through space but through time. These fluid images, however, are meticulously constructed, much like architecture. One guiding image for the current exhibition is the hermitage, a concept that helps explain works containing concealed forms. His fascination with hidden elements, observed and analyzed in fields like biology, anthropology, and psychology, recurs throughout his practice. He sometimes hides the moon in water (not as a reflection) or places an entire landscape inside a wooden box. As suggested by Rosalie Cayou, and Lacan, forms of concealment that blur background and figure, such as mimicry, evoke trance or even death. In A Man Behind a Tree -1, the upper section of the canvas shows the profile of a man against a black background with a clear outline, while in the lower section, another figure is concealed within a patterned space, blending into its surroundings.
When considering the symbolic topology of above and below, potential states transform into present states. In this work, the hidden figure occupies an especially dense space. In a life where only one or two possibilities can be realized out of a hundred, what remains unseen carries far greater weight. Art filled with the bubbling of new creation is like the primordial oceans of Earth, a space where countless trial-and-error combinations take place. Nature, like science or art, has conducted endless experiments. Inspiration or intuition drastically shortens that time, a role often represented by black hole-like images in Chinwook Kim’s work. A Main Behind a Tree-1 evokes a mythic landscape, reminiscent of Botticelli’s Birth of Venues, where sacred beings emerge from water and foam. The shapes filling the canvas, reflecting the artist’s perspective as a man, can be thought of as yang energy. Not limited to gender, but in the sense of the active life force animating all things.
Since the black moon can serve as a metaphor for the self, creation requires the balance of yin and yang. Instespected black circles or openings cool or temper the canvas, or sometimes provide an alternate centre, introducing breaks where leaps or sudden shifts occur in the continuous flow. This turns a gentle narrative into a dramatic story. These centers vary in size and state throughout his works. In An Empty Chair, one flow rising above a horizon line is emphasized, while multiple black moons occupy the space beneath the surface. Their varying sizes give the composition an abstract sense of depth. If space also represents time, the small and large moons symbolize the many spatiotemporal stages required for creation, that is, the actualization of potential. In Kim’s work, the black circles function like black holes, acting as portals that allow movement between dimensions.
In spaces filled with countless undefined patterns, the surface can sometimes be rolled up like a membrane, and the images of creation and destruction often shift through the relationship of folding and unfolding. Deleuze, exploring the dynamic worldview of the Baroque in 『The Fold』, described unfolding as the movement from one fold to another. In his terms, Chinwook Kim’s work shows folds extending infinitely, moving not from point to point, but from fold to fold, with each fold contained within yet another fold. His constantly changing surfaces evoke unpredictable weather phenomena: the wind, rain, or snow reflect the motion of particles in the atmosphere. Clouds, perhaps the most universal image, are every-changing, just like the organic forms in his work, lacking fixed boundaries or straight lines. Many of Kim’s compositions contain edges where the mode of movement shifts, even within a single piece.
The most visible of these boundaries is the horizon. The interplay between liquid and gas is lively in the structure suggested by a horizon line. In Inside and Outside of Landscape-Lake, patterns rising violently above the horizon recall the continuous cycle of seawater evaporating into clouds. Differences in density driven motion. In Inside and Outside of Landscape - Hunting, areas left empty at the centre and increasingly diverse forms and colour toward the edges suggest potential movement that fills the void. Intermittent applications of colour create a tension between completion and incompletion, fullness and emptiness. Unpainted forms evoke incompleteness or blank space, and the predominance of these empty areas shows Kim’s emphasis on emptiness. The void generates anxiety, yet is charged with the excitement of potential fulfillment. The richness of imagination and technical skill that allows for these full, beautiful images sets his work apart from modern art, which is often defined by sparse or barren atmospheres.
Yet even in his work, the basic sentiment of contemporary art; an art defined by permanent transition, is present: anxiety. This anxiety, like other forms, is simply hidden. Formally, it appears as a densely packed visual intensity, a kind of horror vacui making the work itself a fullness of unease. Freud noted that anxiety is ambiguous and lacks a specific object; once it finds a target, it becomes fear. Laca similarly interpreted anxiety as primary, with phobias arising when it is directed at a particular object. Anxiety is embedded in life itself, especially in the life of making art. Psychoanalysis suggests that the archetypical experience of anxiety is birth. Art, demanding repeated acts of creation without protective measures, mirrors this continual rebirth.
Each of Kim’s works can take one or two months to complete, yet the scenes shift rapidly within a single painting, moving from one narrative to the next as if leaving no room for anxiety to settle. The hidden figures in each piece seem to wait for the moment when the viewer’s perception will reveal them, preparing for the next stage of the unfolding scene. The artist’s life mirrors this process: presenting work is the culmination of a long period of incubation, a time of open-ended searching that demands total investment, even at the risk of exhaustion. This process produces anxiety, but the artist knows it is necessary: without it, neither change or novelty is possible. He describes his densely layered compositions, where hidden figures coexist with recurring symbolic objects, as concretizing a space of withdrawal and healing. In Some Anxious Moments, where the horizon is set higher than in other works, the sense of airlessness is particularly strong, and even the water surface evokes thick green algae rather than clear reflection. In Kim’s paintings, anxiety can also be found in the straight lines that contrast with the organic forms, aside from the naturally occurring horizon.
In this work, sharp corners of books or pointed straight lines occasionally appear among the organic forms. Kim treats these grid-like structures, reminiscent of a Western chessboard, as elements contrasting with the flowing, living imagery. The grids are defined in stark black and white, echoing the life of predetermined choices, like a flowchart in which each next move is already set. Such a system, once tied to a local or limited context, now feels globalized. For an artist who spent his childhood in the countryside of Chungcheong, where nature shaped daily life, the straight lines evoking civilization or urban space naturally create tension. His long years abroad likely added to this sense of dislocation: an outsider must acquire everything anew in an unfamiliar symbolic universe. In A Point of Sword, where a sharp corner points downward, there is a sudden movement, whether a fall or an air raid is unclear. Psychology notes the close link between fear and aggression: each can provoke the other.
In The End of the Corridor, a square contains another square, and beyond the unsettling interior, a bright room is invisible. Viewers perceive the difference between these two spaces, much like the man in the painting, already engulfed by the bright circle. In The Rising Moon, beneath the undulating square-checkered floor, a black moon appears ready to ascend, while another moon prepares to rise alongside it. Kim’s black moons give the impression of an enlarged point. He transforms abstract points into physical, celestial-like realities, creating a flexible “point” that neither negates nor fixes its abstract origin. Straight lines connecting points, the shortest path, represent a linear life, an oppressive element enforcing narrow thinking and behaviour. In Up and Down - 1, a diagonal portion of a square-checkered pattern contrasts with the organic forms and black moons below. The dense interconnection of space and time allows viewers to perceive multiple horizons as different temporal layers. The celestial images each viewer envisions free the imagination from the compulsion to universalize a single standard, liberating it from rigid, obsessive constraints.