Kim Bo Seong Director: A Name Continuing the 50-Year Journey of Korean Contemporary Art

Kim Bo Seong has a special place in the history of Korean contemporary art. He draws attention as an artist who realizes his artistic vision.

The year 2025 is a symbolic period for Kim Bo Seong. As 40 years have passed since he opened his first exhibition as an artist. At this turning point, Kim Bo Seong recalls his belief that “Art is a bridge that connects people” and draws a new vision for the future of Korean art.

Kim Boseong Art center Exhibition in Ankara/Türkiye, Art Ankara Contemporary Art Fair 2025 Photo by ©Kim Boseong

Who is Kim Boseong? Could you briefly introduce yourself to us?

Kim Boseong is a distinguished Korean artist and scholar whose multifaceted career spans over four decades. Since 1985, he has published seven poetry books and held an impressive total of 85 solo exhibitions, showcasing his profound artistic vision. With a doctorate from Hongik University Graduate School and an additional doctorate in business administration, Kim Boseong bridges the worlds of art and academia with remarkable depth. For 40 years, he has dedicated himself to exploring Hangeul paintings, blending traditional Korean script with contemporary artistic expression. Currently serving as the President of the Korean Artists Association and a professor at Baekseok University, he continues to inspire new generations of artists and cultural thinkers.

How did you first come up with this original expression called 'Korean Painting'? Can you tell me the birth story of this style?

I didn't start with the intention of making a 'Korean painting' from the beginning. I was an aspiring writer of poetry, and one day, I drew a 'ㄱ' on one wall of my studio, and it looked like a landscape. It was a small shock to me that a simple consonant could evoke such deep emotions. Since then, I have begun to slowly look at each form of Hangul. I have come to realize that it is not just a symbol of sound, but also an aesthetic image and an emotional structure.

Hangeul originally began as a philosophical symbol representing heaven, earth, and people. From its origin, it had aesthetic potential. So, I tried to interpret Hangul as a visual language, returning to my pre-language senses and pre-symbol emotions.

As the saying goes, "Reading pictures," I've pushed the idea of "drawing letters," and that's how the expression of "Korean painting" has naturally taken hold in my work.

What vision did you start with when you established the Kim Boseong Art Center? How does your current appearance compare to your expectations?

There have been numerous exhibitions, but the most memorable exhibition for me is a solo exhibition titled "Inner of Hangeul consonants," which was recently held in 2022. The exhibition was an important turning point where I began to accept Hangul as a trace of emotion and existence, or "body as a symbol," rather than simply a tool of letters or information.

It was a time when I was thinking about how to visualize 'noise language' rather than communicating with the world. Rather than just being interpreted, I wanted the painting in front of the audience to be a space that evokes unspeakable emotions. When I saw many people standing in front of the painting for a long time, in tears throughout the exhibition, I was convinced that painting could be a deeper language than words.

Since then, my work has been directed further to the intersection of silent reverberations, symbols, and emotions, and the original formative language of today's "Korean painting" is also from my inner experience

What vision did you start with when you established the Kim Boseong Art Center? How does your current appearance compare to your expectations?

When I founded Kim Boseong Art Center, I had a question in my mind. "Where is the place where the artist can keep his language to the end?" There are many exhibitions and many art galleries, but there is not enough autonomous space for the artist to experiment with his voice, fail, and try again. So I wanted to create an artistic ecosystem where the artist's thoughts are accumulated and conversations and experiments come and go, not just for exhibitions.

The beginning was rather humble. Looking back, however, 32,000 artists from home and abroad have passed through the city and, in recent years, through connection with overseas art fairs, have been able to participate in world art discourse. He has worked as both a director of the Bangladesh Biennale and a domestic art director.

It is more than expected, and there is still a lot to fill in. What is clear, however, is that the Kim Boseong Art Center has grown not only as an exhibition space, but also as a place of memory and a shelter of our philosophy that contains artists' time. I would like to keep this space open so that the artists' language can be heard without being buried in the future.

How do you think it's affecting their art journey, providing opportunities for young and middle-aged artists to exhibit?

I believe that providing an exhibition opportunity does not just provide a "space to hang a work," but also provides a place for an artist's language to face the world for the first time. For young artists in particular, the first exhibition is a question and a declaration. It's the process of organizing the question, "What kind of world do I want to talk about?" and making them answer themselves.

It is different for middle-aged artists. For them, the exhibition is a time for reflection on what they have accumulated and an opportunity for a new leap forward. Many artists say that they hoped the Kim Boseong Art Center would serve as a stage for such a turning point and that they have redefined their direction through the exhibition.

What I do for you is not a big deal. I just insisted on the "space where the artist is at the center." The art world often revolves around the market, like art fairs, but I still believe in artists who are at the center of their creation and hold onto it to the end. I hope that belief has helped them, too.

You described the Kim Boseong Art Center as the 'laboratory of modern Korean painting'. Could you please introduce the most impressive or experimental example of the project you have done so far?

Yes, I think that expression is not just a rhetorical meaning but a definition that accurately tells us the direction we have been aiming for. The Kim Boseong Art Center became the third director of the 50-year-old Grocery Gallery before its opening, and the museum of the late artist Kim Heung-soo, which introduced Harmonistic philosophy and oriental works to the world stage, reopened the Kim Boseong Art Center under my name. And turning a blind eye to the existing commercial gallery management method of Grocery Gallery, I did my best to discover underilluminated artists such as the Donghak Movement in Korea. One of the most impressive experiments was to give myself the whiplash of work and to devote my passion.

Especially, rather than being a memorable writer, the courage to leave without staying here was created. I was happier to find a new writer instead of holding on to a successful writer. I think it's healthier to challenge than to be complacent. I hope the center will be a safe zone and starting point for the experiment. Art is, after all, an endless question and adventure.

Do you think Korea's art environment is sufficiently inclusive and supportive to young artists? If there is something that is still lacking, what is it?

To be honest, the Korean art environment is still structurally insufficient to fully embrace the artist's individual survival and experimentation fully. Although competitions and creative support systems have increased, they are still one-off-oriented, and there is little long-term support to help the artist continue to grow.

Young artists are pushed into too much of a competition for exhibition opportunities, and are sometimes judged by their portfolio composition or network rather than their work. My biggest concern is that the most important "ability to ask questions" and "courage to endure failure" disappear in a structure where art is bound to be judged.

So, I wanted to provide a space where artists can fail and time to experiment through the Kim Boseong Art Center. A structure that waits for the depth of art language rather than short-term achievements—I think that's the most necessary part of our art environment right now.

The artist is not a mirror of the times, but a being who looks beyond that mirror. If an environment is created in which the gaze can be protected to the end, the future of Korean art will be able to take a much richer and more original path.

 You recently participated in international events such as ARTCONTACT in Istanbul. How do you think these exhibitions affect Korean art and artists?

An international exhibition is not just a place to introduce a work abroad. I think it is a laboratory of intercultural sensitivity. What I felt most strongly while participating in this Istanbul ARTCONTACT exhibition was the possibility that Korean art is no longer staying in a regional language, but growing into a global language that has both universality and independence.

In particular, the reaction of local audiences was not just curiosity, but they were serious about the structure of lyricism, symbols, and emotional depth contained in the work. It is not just because 'Korean things' are amazing, but I think it is evidence that 'modernity of Korea' can meet the universal question of the world.

Above all, it is an important opportunity for writers to gain confidence and courage that they had not recognized before when their language crosses borders. That soon becomes the fuel for a new creation.

In the future, I think these international contacts should not only be a one-off event, but should lead to a platform for continuous exchange and research. The future task is for Korean art to have the power to speak independently in the global art discourse from 'being seen' to ‘participating’.

When do you feel a work is 'completed'? What are the criteria?

The word 'completion' is always a fluid and ambiguous concept in my work. Rather than 'completing' the work, I wait for the moment when I have to stop talking, or the moment when the work stops talking on its own.

It doesn't end by stopping the brush, but when I feel that my intervention is no longer necessary -- it's the moment when the work exists for itself. It's kind of like watching a child put his or her parent's hand away and walk on his or her feet.

The criteria are not so much technical perfection or formal balance, but rather whether the emotional breathing has been touched, whether the preference has stopped shaking, and whether the work is in a “state of being able to talk to someone other than me.”

Sometimes I don't feel the real completion until a few years after I finish my work. As such, I think completion is not a conclusion, but an acceptance of stopping. For me, the work is always open, and I'm just a person who stays in the gap for a while and then comes out.

You are active in various fields of art, such as poetry, music, and art, and do you feel there is a connection between them? How do you influence each other?

For me, poetry, music, and art are not completely different means of expression, but rather a form in which one emotion breathes in three different ways. The same emotions are translated into rhythm and sound in music, a condensation of language in poetry, and image and space in art.

For example, when an emotional wave occurs, you hum it with sound at first, and at some point, a line of a sentence emerges, and the sentence leads to another line and is completed into a picture. Work flows across genres in that way.

I always want to hold onto pre-linguistic emotions. They are sometimes expressed in colors better than words, and sometimes a single note encapsulates all of them. So my work is always on translation, moving between the three. It's the process of turning language into pictures, pictures into poems, and poems back into music. It's been 40 years since the first exhibition of Hangeul as a painting. Master of Hangeul Conversation. I like the term "writer," although he says he is the king of Hangeul conversation.

This intersection gives me a more three-dimensional view of my own emotions and gives me the conviction that art is, after all, a multilingual derived from one essence. So I want to continue my work as a multilingual being of emotions, not as a 'writer of a genre’.

Do you have any new projects or international collaboration plans that you would like to work on in the future at Kim Boseong Art Center?

Yes, I am still working on some important projects. One of them is the "Language of Sensitivity," which is an international rotation centered on non-verbal expression of emotions. I would like to experiment with global audiences on the possibility that emotions can be transmitted without communication based on Korea's symbolic sensibility and conversational language.

The first stage is planned to be based in major cities in Europe and the Middle East, and the achievements in Istanbul and Ankara became the starting point. Another is the "International Joint Workshop on Hangeul-Symbol Painting," in which writers with various language systems interpret and exchange their characters as visual arts. It will be a place to break down the boundaries between letters and pictures and experiment on how different cultures form a consensus through "symbols." One of the reasons may be the purpose of my work to write novels related to Hangeul and to publicize them.

Ultimately, the Kim Boseong Art Center aims to become a platform to design art discourse and restore community feelings beyond exhibitions. In the future, we plan to continue to promote projects with both experience and internationality.

 Ece Yıldırım with Kim Boseong, Art Contact İstanbul Art fair 2023

Kim Boseong is an artist who has published seven volumes of poetry, held 85 solo exhibitions, completed a Ph.D. at Hongik University Graduate School, earned an M.D. in Business Administration, has 40 years of experience in Korean language and culture, serves as the Chairman of the Korea Artists Association, and is a professor at Baekseok University.

This interview was conducted when they came to the exhibition for the 24th May 2025 ArtContact Istanbul Art Fair.

I had the chance to work with him in various exhibitions in Türkiye, and thank you again for this interview. I hope you enjoyed reading it.