Cheolyu Kim

“Innumerable lines make a solid form; building and then dividing. Forming a composition of their own space and story; they become my very own landscape.” – Cheolyu Kim

Cheolyu Kim’s Journey to Nowhere #24 (2015) and Journey to Nowhere #28 (2017) wrap neo-surrealist dreamscapes through delicate undulation of precisely mapped lines. An oeuvre populated by the repetition for his idiosyncratic imageries of afterlife, outer-space and distant worlds, the artist’s unique childhood yielded an unconventional aesthetic and perspective. Growing up in a 16-household village by the DMZ between North and South Korea, the young Kim saw strange objects journeying to and from nowhere: thousands of balloons often mysteriously emerge overnight carrying foreign and enigmatic propaganda pamphlets; on one occasion a spy plane from a foreign land dropped and crashed from the skies.

Kim’s virtuosity in precision draftmanship produces an aesthetic collision of the straight and narrow with the non-linear, exploding sculpted moiré clouds that fail to obliterate but rather form bridges connecting his works’ infinite dimensions of lines and universes. The artist declares: “[The art of] interlinking the universe [through lines] is meditation for me. I am not trying to comment [on anything political]. It is spiritual.”

Kim trained in Seoul and New York and holds BFA and MFA in sculpture. He draws on paper and birchwood using archival ink and his recent exhibitions were held in Seoul, London and New York.

Selected exhibition:

2022 – “Be High, Journey to nowhere”, Redbase Gallery Art, Sydney
2017 – “Be High, Journey to nowhere”, Gallery Artbn, Seoul, Korea
2013 – Solo Show, Lotte Gallery, Ilsan, Korea
2012 – “Nowhere”, Gaain Gallery, Seoul, Korea
2009 – “Delta Quadrant(Nowhere)”, Samtoh Gallery, Seoul, Korea
2008 – “Solo Exhibition of Recent Works”, Slate Gallery-Brooklyn, NYC
2003 – Cue Art Foundation, Curated by Nikki S,Lee, New York, NYC