Artist Kim Eull (b. 1954) has garnered attention for his broad spectrum of work that transcends the narrow definition and formal limitations of the medium of drawing and encompasses various boundaries such as painting, sculpture, and installation. Kim perceives and works with drawing as an attitude rather than a form. For him, drawing is associated with an attitude of freedom, honesty, and a clear conscience.

After studying metal craft at university, the artist turned to fine art and his first subject was himself. A vast series of Self-Portrait dating back to the early to mid-1990s was largely destroyed in a studio fire in 1998, and only two early works remain. One of them, Myself (1997), depicts the artist with his eyes closed, lost in thought. In this work, the artist has filled his silhouette with a collage of copperplate pieces that have been chemically treated to allow him to apply oil paint. Copper plates have been mainly used of his works since his early work and are related to his major, metal craft.

In his works, the thick layers of oil paint, copperplate, and other materials are incongruously stacked on top of the panel, and their strong materiality conveys the depth of Matiere's serious exploration of the weight of reality, the world, and existence. Choi's roughly textured paintings express the artist's concerns about society and the world, including his own identity, with an unadorned simplicity and innocence.

As Kim drew countless faces of his own, he realized that he could see the faces of his ancestors in them. From this point on, he began to create the Blood Map series, a series of paintings that depicted his family history with the question, “Where I am from and who am I?” The series culminated in his solo exhibition “#265 Okha-ri” at Project Space Sarubia in 2002. The title of the exhibition, “#265 Okha-ri,” refers to the address of the house owned by the head family where Kim was born and raised. The series consists of portraits of five generations, the house of the head family, their ancestral graveyard, and a map of their landholdings.

However, while working on Self-Portrait and Blood Map, Kim realized that he could not capture all the stories he wanted to tell. The artist then turned to drawing, which allowed him to freely deal with the multidimensional world around him, both the external world and his own inner world. Compared to other artistic genres, drawing's freedom of form, flexible approach, and the ability to produce large amounts of work quickly suited his artistic attitude.  

While his previous paintings showed an artist's consciousness and awareness of the times, reflections on life and ideology, his drawing projects, which began in 2002, show a looser, freer imagination and playfulness in drawing. There is no clear sense of theme in his drawings, but instead, the artist's inner feelings and thoughts at the time, peripheral stories, events, and issues are drawn flexibly like a diary. Kim's drawings are the result of her sensitive response to the huge world he is confronting with his whole body. Galaxy, created for the “2016 Korea Artist Prize” exhibition, is an installation of 1,232 drawings from 2003 to 2016 in the form of a giant cosmos on a wall. Like the birth process of the universe, his drawings are drawn on paper without any specific purpose, and then they gather in countless numbers and occupy space like a universe. This cosmic form that the viewer sees is a kind of self-portrait that synthesizes all of the artist's thoughts in a moment.

The series Twilight Zone is one of Kim's works that exemplifies his attitude as an artist. 'Twilight Zone' has dictionary meanings such as the deepest layer of the ocean where light reaches, the middle ground (state), an area with unclear boundaries, dawn, twilight, etc. For the artist, it means a primordial state of existence before it was named in language, a state of indeterminacy and variability, a state of the middle ground where boundaries are erased. The artist stands in that unclear in-between, looking at the world in a more multidimensional way and freely capturing it in his drawings.

In order to show the viewer his inner life, including his attitude as an artist and his direction through drawing, the artist invited the viewer to visit his studio in the museum. Twilight Zone Studio, which was presented at the “2016 Korea Artist Prize” exhibition at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, is an installation that recreates the artist's actual house, a two-story building that he built himself as a carpenter for a living, with a workshop on the first floor and a living room on the second floor.

For the artist, building a house, like drawing, is as much a part of his life as his work, and the process of building a house reflects his life and attitude. His drawings are extended into space as a middle ground where anything can be imagined and become anything.

In this way, Kim presents drawing as an attitude of life, not only on paper, but also in a way that freely crosses the boundaries of genres such as sculpture and installation. In his solo exhibition “EULLdalism : Drawing is Hammering” at OCI Museum of Art in 2022, the artist presented works based on the sentence “Drawing is Hammering”.

As the phrase suggests, for him, drawing is not just an object as a result, but an attitude that encompasses a certain behavior. He says that his mission as an artist is to always stand in the middle and break the mold of conventional thinking.

“My drawings are miscellaneous paintings. Although they sometimes yield unintended special subjects, they are basically a random mix of trivial things. My mind, life, world, and the whole universe are miscellaneous mixtures, which is why my drawings look so natural. Although their contents and forms are all mixed, some of the there must be things worth looking at, if you are careful about being cross-eyed.” (Kim Eull, My Great Drawings (2011), pp. 4-5.)

Kim Eull studied Metal Craft at Won-Kwang Univeristy and received his M.F.A in Jewelry Design at Graduate school of Industrial Arts, Hongik University. His major solo exhibitions are “EULLdalism : Drawing is Hammering” (OCI Museum of Art, Seoul, 2022), “BTP” (Space ZAMO, Seoul, 2021), “Commemorating the Lee Joong Seob Award” (Museum of Chosun Ilbo, Seoul, 2018), “Twilight zone Studio” (KUNSTRAUME, Cologne, Germany, 2018), and more. He has participated various group exhibitions including “Beyond time & space” (Seongnam Art Center, Seongnam, 2021), “MMCA Cheongju Opening Exhibition” (MMCA Cheongju, Cheongju, 2019), and “Learning Machine” (Nam June Paik Art Center, Yong-in, 2013).

References

• 올해의 작가상, 김을 (Korea Artist Prize, Kim Eull) :
• 국립현대미술관, 김을 | 나 | 1997 (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea, Kim Eull | Myself | 1997) :
• 프로젝트 스페이스 사루비아, 옥하리 265번지 (Project Space Sarubia, #265 Okha-ri) :
• OCI미술관, 김을파손죄 (OCI Museum, EULLdalism : Drawing is Hammering) :