I paint in public.
Black, white, silver and gold. Hangul, Chinese characters and the Roman alphabet enter the same line and lose their borders.
Peak · Gwongeumseong, Outer Seoraksan · no. 115 of 133
Watch this one being painted →
A letter becomes a limb, a character becomes a doorway, a word becomes architecture. Kent Kim grew up between Seoul and New Jersey and has spent his working life moving between the two languages. The paintings are what that movement looks like when it is set down in one gesture.
He works fast, in one sitting, in front of whoever is watching. Between September 2023 and 2024 he carried that practice the length of South Korea and made one hundred and thirty-three paintings on location — each one taking its subject from where it stood, each one filmed from the first mark to the signature.
Selected work
Acrylic on canvas, from 33 × 42 cm to 100 × 100 cm, unframed on stretchers. Captions follow the form: title, medium, dimensions, year.
2024 — ongoing
Ten thousand drawings, given away.
In September 2024 he set out to draw for ten thousand people and give every drawing away. He draws each person's own name — in Hangul, in the Roman alphabet, in Chinese characters, whatever the name is spelled in — signs it, and stamps it with his seal. Each one takes about a minute.
The idea came at Frieze Seoul in September 2024. He went four days running, on the invitation of an older figure in the Korean art world, through halls holding work from a hundred and twenty of the world's galleries, and the question that stayed with him was not about any painting on the walls: everyone here is trying to sell. Nobody is giving anything away.
He began on 22 September. By 21 November the thousandth drawing had been handed over; by early December, eleven hundred.
Some of the places
- 09.22Fourth Lausanne Congress, Songdo — five thousand delegates from abroad
- 09.30Gutzlaff Hangul writing competition, Seoul City Hall
- 10.03World Taekwondo Junior Championships, Chuncheon — 1,600 athletes from 129 countries. Film
- 10.08Global Taekwondo Federation, Seoul — 220 visitors from 131 countries. The three hundredth. Press
- 10.12Pohang — the four hundred and fiftieth
- 10.16International Mobility Industry Show, KINTEX, Ilsan
- 11.09International Medical Tourism Fair, BEXCO, Busan
- 11.15G-Star, Busan — the eight hundredth
- 11.21Smart Construction Expo, Ilsan — the thousandth
- 12.05Hotel and Restaurant Show, BEXCO, Busan — the eleven hundredth
Why a name
A name is the one word everybody already owns. Written in a script its owner cannot read, it turns back into shape — which is what these paintings have always been.
Many of the people who have carried one home were visitors from abroad, seeing their own name in Hangul for the first time. Anyone who came in a white shirt had it painted onto the cloth instead of paper.
Nothing is sold at the table and nothing is signed up for. Eleven hundred of these are now in eleven hundred homes.
Studio and exhibitions
Alongside the work made on location, a body of studio paintings — the same line, worked slower, and with gold and silver given more room.
Two solo exhibitions in Seoul in 2023, in Gangnam — at Gallery Lona and at D:STA Gallery.
One Hundred and Thirty-Three Places is not a new departure. It is the same question, asked thirty-five years later, in one hundred and thirty-three locations.