Tradition of Monochrome painting
Monochrome painting, which became active from 1970's, called "Dansaekhwa", forms the mainstream and is regarded as an important tendency in contemporary art in Korea. "Dansaekhwa" is now getting highly noticed internationally as "Gutai" and "Mono-ha" in Japan. Many artists who started to work in 1990's have experience to study in Europe or United States and therefore monochrome painting itself shows various development in material and technique these days.
He himself has no experience to study abroad, through the communication with those artists in his same generation, Kim Taek sang has been sought his identity as a Korean artist, deepened his thought and made effort to establish the originality of his works. Kim Taek Sang is now regarded as the center artist of the second generation of "Dansaekhwa".
Trace of Nature
He does not use any brush, painting knife or palette, letting water, gravity of earth, nature to paint. First he makes a rectangular pool filled with water. Then soaks the unstretched canvas into this pool and pour water mixed with acrylic paint. The water slowly evaporates leaving its traces on the canvas. Temperature, humidity and atmospheric pressure, season and weather make the difference and variation in those traces. In this process, the only one thing the artist has to do is to wait. After the certain period of time, Kim Taek sang drains the water and takes the canvas out from the pool, then puts the canvas on the wall to dry. He repeats this process over and over with the same canvas, overlapping the colors in many layers.
Painting by Time
Kim Taek sang's work is thus actual traces of water and it contains passage of time, just same as the rings of tree. All he has to do is to arrange the conditions of materials for the passage of time and nature to reveal themselves in the visible form to us.
Color of Nature and Expression of Light
The colors he uses are from nature; red from setting sun, blue from ocean or sky, green from trees, yellow from sun. Because his works have so many layers, light reflects in each layer complicatedly and we can see very unique color. It is the same as the color of human skin, which is created by the cells and blood vessel inside.
Created deliberately with plenty of time, covered with soft and gentle colors, his works give the sense or notion of "maturity" or "ripeness" to the viewer.
After his last solo show in 2018 in Tokyo, his work has become more varied, with the use of irregularly shaped fabrics as underlay when soaking canvas into the pool to give his intentional expression, and the fluorescent colors of the Northern Lights and beetles being introduced as new natural colors.
