"Untitled (15-VII-69 #90)” (1969) was produced during Kim’s New York era. It is one of the series where he attempted to compile four pieces with independent compositions onto a single canvas as part of his efforts to develop his dot painting style. Four divided yet equal parts, based on the intersection of horizontal and vertical lines, produce a unified composition on the canvas.
Kim Whanki (1913？1974), also known under the penname Suhwa, is part of the first generation of Korean abstract artists who established his own unique oeuvre by inoculating Korean lyricism with Western modernism by means of sophisticated and sublimed visual vocabularies. While he was pursuing his study in the department of fine arts at the College of Art of the Nihon University, Tokyo after enrolling in 1933, Kim delved into contemporary Western avant-garde art including Cubism, Futurism, and abstract art. Kim returned to Korea after holding his first solo exhibition in 1937 in Tokyo, and later organized a school of Neo-realism together with Yoo Youngkuk and Lee Gyu-sang, among others. Kim Whanki served on the faculty at the College of Fine Arts at Seoul National University from 1948 to 1950 before engaging in the activities as a navy war correspondent painter in 1951. He served as a professor at Hongik University between 1952 and 1955, and 1959 and 1963. He pursued his art in Paris, France, between 1956 and 1959, and later from 1963 until he passed away in 1974 in New York. He took part in the 1963 and 1965 Bienal de Sao Paulo, and received the Grand Prize at the 1st Korean Fine Arts Grand Prize Exhibition sponsored by the Hankook-Ilbo for “Where, in What Form, Shall We Meet Again”in 1970.
Kim Whanki’s art can be divided into five phases according to era: Japan (1933？37), Seoul (1937？56), Paris (1956？59), Seoul (1959？63), and New York (1963-74). During his early student years in Japan, he made adventurous attempts experimenting with the latest trends in Western avant-garde art including Cubism, Futurism, and abstraction. In his first Seoul era, the period between when he returned from Japan in 1937 until he left for Paris in 1956, Kim worked on art that arose from the grief of Koreans from the time preceding and ollowing the Korean War, by means of a number of motifs including jars, women, and tents. In the Paris era between 1956 and 1959, he delved into abstract art in earnest, developing semi-abstract works based on jars, the ten traditional symbols of longevity, and apricot blossoms, thus progressing toward Korean abstract art. Later, Kim simplified numerous motifs including the moon, mountains, and clouds to create a concise abstract painting series based on variations of blue during his second Seoul era between 1959 and 1963. In the last phase in New York from 1963 to 1974, Kim’s abstract art evolved based on the style of dot painting. Until when his first dot paintings were shown in 1970, Kim Whanki’s style had gone through countless formative experiments starting from 1964, thereby creating a new kind of Korean abstract art through a natural smudging effect that displayed the varying density and bleeding of ink in Korean paintings while utilizing Western materials such as oil color on canvas. As is evident in his representative work, “Where, in What Form, Shall We Meet Again,” dot painting is an abstract style of painting in which the basic unit―a dot marked on the middle of a square―fills the entire
canvas, while numerous dot units group together, disperse, or spin, creating dynamic movement that resembles a constellation.
