There is a Korean word jeong. It does not have an exact counterpart in English. Meaning something akin to an amalgam of neighborly love, affection, loyalty, and generosity. Jeong is a value and social bond deeply ingrained in the Korean psyche. Koreans would say, “we’ve been infused with jeong,” and as a good wine matures, it develops over time as a relationship grows deeper and more nuanced. The paintings of Kim Guiline engage the viewer in much the same way. The matte monochrome gridded canvases rhythmically dotted with dabs of paint do not inspire immediate seduction but rather invite a slower convivial contemplation with their haptic, earthy warmth. Gradually one may feel, if not quite see, in the deep color fields a quiet radiance emanating from the many visible and invisible layers of paint. Such subtle, affective complexity reveals how belying their humble charm, the paintings of Kim Guiline comprise five decades of rigorous formalist exploration of an artist who pushes our perceptual limits and teaches us to see.

Kim’s lifelong quest to convey the ineffable in the medium of painting arose out of his frustrations to express himself in another art form. Kim’s first love was poetry. Having majored in French literature as an undergraduate, Kim moved to France in 1961 to continue his studies. Struggling to master the art in a foreign language, he traded the poet’s pen for a painter’s brush in 1962. Kim says he still regrets not having been able to become a poet, but even on the canvas, he never let go of his poetic sensibilities. Inspired by dreams from his childhood, his earliest works in the first half of the 1960s were figurative—oneiric, surrealist scenes of birds with human legs in flight. Rendered with calligraphic, gestural flourishes of the brush, the early works exhibited an outsider artist’s raw and expressionist tendencies and psychologically charged contents.

Entering the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1965 marked Kim’s pivot to the formal reductionism that would define his practice henceforth. The abstract landscapes from this time, compositions of flat and geometric shapes in bright colors recall the paintings of another painter who has garnered recognition late in her career, Etel Adnan. Kim and Adnan share some uncanny parallels in their works and biographies. Originally from Lebanon, Adnan studied in France and is a poet. She took up painting as she gave up writing in the French language in 1960 to demonstrate solidarity with the Algerian War of Independence. She, like Kim, was deeply inspired by the works of Nicolas de Staël and often painted from memory the Mediterranean sea of her childhood.

Also an expat grappling with reconciling his penchant for poetry with painting’s visual vernacular of color and form, remembrances from his early years pervade Kim’s entire oeuvre. Kim left his hometown of Gowon, South Hamgyong Province in North Korea at the age of twelve, shortly before the Korean War broke out. He has not been able to go back since. Indelible memories of his native land continue to haunt his works—the mountains and gorges depicted in the late 1960s landscape works giving way to the evocative motifs of dragonfly wings and Korean wood frame windows in his later mature works.

Kim’s works became more emphatically abstract in the early 1970s as he embarked on his black paintings series. Stripping the constituents of paintings to their bare essences, Kim turned his attention to investigations of color. His quest to hone in on the most fundamental of colors led him to black and to a lesser degree, white. Scientific statuses of black and white constituting the absences of color and the combination of all colors, along with their manifold symbolic associations across cultures to represent binary relationships provided Kim with both a clean grounding on which to explore the materiality and perceptual possibilities of painting as well as a rich context in which to interpret the work. Black and white also resonated with Kim as elemental colors of Korea, alongside red, blue, and yellow.

Early examples from this period feature canvases on which Kim mounted multiple sheets of Korean paper—with horizontally oriented rectangular pieces of colored paper in black, white, red, yellow, blue and green nested within the backgrounding black paper dyed with Indian ink. These spare compositions, reminiscent of the reductive geometric chromatic studies of Josef Albers and the evocative bruised color palette of Mark Rothko. Also engage in dialogue with hard-edged Abstract Expressionist explorations of the sublime by Barnett Newman, whom Kim admired greatly. The simple juxtapositions of color draw attention to the material qualities of the paper, its fibrous transparency creating modulations of color and revealing the layers beneath. Though he spent most of his adult life in France, Kim’s telluric and tactile works register strongly as Korean. Due to the aesthetic affinity between Kim’s works and examples of Dansaekhwa, Kim is often associated with the 1970s Korean monochrome movement which has received a remarkable reassessment in the postwar art historical canon in the last two years. However, there are key factors that distinguish Kim’s works from Dansaekhwa. Superficially, Kim largely focused on coloristic explorations of black in the 1970s when Dansaekhwa’s most prominent exponents were garnering notice for their white paintings.1)

1) The 1975 exhibition Five Korean Artists, Five Kinds of White at Tokyo Gallery in Tokyo is often cited as having brought Dansaekhwa as catalyzing the movement.

More substantively, Dansaekhwa emerged in response to the sociopolitical conditions of Korea in 1970s. Eschewing the propagandist figurative art championed by the state, Dansaekhwa artists turned inward, creating sober monochrome, abstract compositions. Which privileged and laid bare the repetitive, ritualistic processes with humble materials. Their works marked a withdrawal from and disavowal of the authoritarian regime but at the same time evaded censorship with the resolute self-referentiality of their abstraction. Kim’s works on the other hand, consistently manifested his poetic proclivities for visual metonyms and metaphors.

Living in Paris at the time, Kim’s engagement with the political situation in Korea was tangential. Rather, other political events shaped the artistic discourse and context that had a more direct influence on Kim’s practice. The student protests of 1968 in France catalyzed the consolidation of the movement Supports/Surfaces, whose members sought to dismantle the establishment—both in the art world and the world at large. Their strategy for aesthetic and political revolution was not to abandon painting but to confront the problems of the medium from within. Artists such as such as Louis Cane, Claude Viallat, and André-Pierre Arnal deconstructed components of painting. In fact, taking apart the canvas and stretcher to hang paintings on dowels, incorporating everyday materials like dishcloths.

While not part of the movement, Kim took on the Supports/Surface’s mandate to deconstruct painting, but with his characteristic restraint. While Kim never forsook the stretcher support, his works from the 1970s onwards evinces his singular focus to distill and refine the painting to its fundamentals. He was deeply influenced by the ideas of the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In the 1964 essay Eye and Mind, Merleau-Ponty wrote that a painting “gives visible existence to what profane vision believes to be invisible; thanks to it we do not need a ‘muscular sense’ in order to possess the voluminosity of the world.”

The idea of making the invisible visible has defined Kim’s artistic mission of the last four decades. Kim gave his own interpretation to the Merleau-Ponty’s idea of ‘voluminosity,’ breaking it down to volume and luminosity, notions he tied to color and light in his own work. Kim’s investigations of monochrome turns the attention of the viewer to spatial, textual, and material properties of the painting, inviting contemplation of light’s interplay with the smooth layers of matte oil paint the haptic relief comprised of dots.

Indeed, Kim’s works are ultimately about the act of seeing. The Visible, Invisible and Inside, Outside (the titles reference Merleau-Ponty) series best represent his intentions. In these mature works from mid-1970s through today, Kim lays down multiple layers of paint (as many as thirty) with sweeping and steady brushstrokes. With an economy of means—Kim limits his mark making to vertical and horizontal lines and dots—he constructs the gridded compositions of the paintings. The framing pattern formed by the grid highlight the support structure undergirding the painting, drawing attention to the area and space outside of its objecthood. Also evoke the traditional Korean windows that serve a metaphorical role, suggesting an inner space behind the painting that is invisible.

In the 1980s, Kim opened up his palette to clarion bright colors of red, blue, yellow, green, and brown. The works still retained Kim’s succinct poignancy and subtlety. Despite his engagement with philosophy, Kim has always been led by intuition and sensitivity. Punctuated with the embossment of dots in organic, primordial shapes, Kim’s paintings bear the distinctive touch of the artist, akin to son-mat, frequently used Korean term that translates to “flavor of the hand.” The humble disposition of Kim’s works gently repudiate today’s frenetic cultural spectacle beckons us to slow down to observe and feel the familial numinous. The paintings prod us to see beyond the limits of optical discernment with affective perception and ground our awareness of being in the world.