“Choong Sup Lim: Stroke” Installation view at Gallery Hyundai ©Gallery HyundaiGallery Hyundai presents “Stroke”, a solo exhibition of Choong Sup Lim (b.1941) through January 21. “Stroke” marks the artist’s third exhibition at Gallery Hyundai following “Monochromatic Thinking” in 2017 and “Drawing, In Between” in 2021.
This exhibition features approximately forty works ranging from 1980s, when Lim began devising his unique artistic language after his move to New York in the early 1970s, to recent works of 2020. “Stroke” underscores the aesthetic achievements of the artist who has held various experiments on the formality between Western modern art and Eastern calligraphy that are independent from any specific art movement or theory.
Lim constructs his unique oeuvre through experimenting across diverse media and genres such as painting, drawing, sculpture, objects, installation, and media arts. Boundless in his choice of materials, he encapsulates eccentric shapes and forms in collages and assemblages of everyday objects. Materials with various properties and functions, such as tree branches, bird feathers, chopsticks, fur used in clothing, industrial nails, zippers, rulers, window nets, and toilet paper—often found while walking the streets of New York—are arranged or overlapped onto the same surface. “Stroke” features heterogeneous paintings that combine various media, minimal and monochromatic sculptures, installation that explores the void and formative elements of nature through soil, as well as one that counter-poses the development of civilization to nature, using thread as a medium. The exhibition explores Lim’s aesthetic journey, through which he has established a unique artistic language within the Korean contemporary art scene.
Born in 1941 in Jincheon, Chungcheongbuk-do, where Choong Sup Lim also spent his childhood, he graduated from Seoul National University College of Fine Arts in 1964. Since moving to New York in 1973, he has continued to live and work there while experimenting with semi-abstract or materiality-centered paintings and installations. From the 1970s, when he started to live in New York, and through the 1980s, Choong Sup Lim produced minimal drawings on Korean paper, assemblages of found objects, irregular canvas works, and installations that utilized walls and floors. In the 1990s and 2000s, he would begin to utilize objects more actively—to him, found objects are objects “that house traces of the modern person’s subconscious.” From the 2010 through the present, Choong Sup Lim has continued to expand the breadth of his work by presenting complex installations that reflect a Korean sensibility.
