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“That a still surface can hold yesterday, today, tomorrow at once; that here, there, and elsewhere can meet in the same moment; that different times and spaces can unfold together on a single, fixed plane—it still fills me with wonder.” —Kim Bohie, July 2026
Gallery Hyundai is pleased to present TOWARDS: There Was Light , a solo exhibition by Kim Bohie (b. 1952), on view from August 26 through October 18. This exhibition marks Kim’s first solo exhibition in Korea since the Days at the Jeju Museum of Contemporary Art in 2022. It also brings her back to Gallery Hyundai for her presentation with the gallery in thirty-eight years, following The Third Kim Bohie Solo Exhibition in 1988. TOWARDS: There Was Light surveys more than four decades of Kim’s sustained engagement with nature, focusing on her exploration of light in painting. Featuring approximately thirty works, the exhibition presents new paintings from the Towards series that depict the garden and sea of Jeju, flowers, fruits, and her dog Leo, and other landscapes intimately connected to the artist’s daily life alongside the monumental The Days (2022), recently shown in the Unlimited sector of Art Basel in Basel earlier this year.
Rather than simply perpetuating the traditions of Korean painting or adopting Western conventions, Kim has developed a distinctive pictorial language that brings the materials and formal sensibilities of East Asian painting into dialogue with the chromatic fields and expanded scale of modern and contemporary painting. Working on canvas and hanji , she repeatedly applies mixtures of traditional mineral pigments, water, and glue, allowing color to slowly permeate and accumulate in translucent layers that create a depth particular to her work. Her figurative compositions bring together different experiences of time: the prolonged observation of nature, the time in which a landscape settles into memory as an inner image, and its eventual reconstruction. What matters in Kim’s work, therefore, is not simply what she depicts, but how the time and sensations accumulated through looking and remembering re-emerge as landscape. Nature experienced at different moments and in different places converges on a single plane, where past and present, near and far, observed landscape and inner image coexist within the same pictorial space.
Within this process, light serves as both a sensory measure through which Kim perceives nature and a medium through which she registers its ceaseless passage and change. Shifting with the hours of the day and the seasons, light renders the same garden or sea anew each time, altering its colors, contours, and atmosphere. Kim has long attended to these subtle transformations, holding them in memory before reconstituting them through her own perception and imagination on the painted surface. Her engagement with light predates her recent paintings of Jeju. As early as the 1970s, she depicted dawn filtering through a forest and light shimmering across the surface of a river. Across the decades, her subjects have encompassed deep greens under intense sunlight, the sea and its horizon, the waxing and waning moon, and plants transformed by the seasons—nature continually remade by changing conditions of light.
The exhibition title TOWARDS: There Was Light alludes to the moment of creation when light first emerges from darkness and the world begins to take form. It resonates with Kim’s lifelong gratitude and reverence for nature, while extending beyond spiritual symbolism to describe a fundamental condition of her painting: light enables her to perceive change and time in the natural world and to translate those perceptions into pictorial form. Just as light allows the colors and forms of the world to become visible, Kim’s paintings begin with sustained attention to nature as it changes from one moment to the next. Her gaze carries within it different seasons and times, places once encountered, and innumerable living beings and fleeting moments, accumulated as layers of memory and sensation. In this sense, “There Was Light” refers not only to the light by which the world becomes visible, but also metaphorically to that which summons the artist’s lived and remembered experience into the present tense of painting, drawing disparate times and spaces into a single pictorial landscape.
The title also draws on Towards , one of Kim’s principal bodies of work. Rather than implying arrival at a fixed destination, “Towards” describes a way of looking that continually reaches beyond what is immediately present. Life on Jeju has drawn this attention ever closer to the world of her everyday surroundings. Palm trees, flowers, fruit, and seeds from the garden she tends; the sea and horizon she encounters daily; and Leo, the dog who remained by her side for many years, have all entered her paintings. A gaze directed toward a single leaf or seed expands to encompass a tree and then the entire garden before opening outward toward the sea and beyond the horizon. Through this movement from part to whole, from near to far, minute forms of life and expansive landscapes emerge not as separate subjects but as different dimensions of a shared world. Just as Kim’s gaze moves from seed to garden, garden to sea, and from the smallest life before her toward what lies beyond the horizon, her painting never settles into a single, definitive landscape, but continually looks beyond it.
The exhibition unfolds across three floors, following these shifts in vision and transformations of light. On the first floor, new paintings from the Towards series depict the flowers and plants of Kim’s garden, her dog Leo, the sea, and the setting sun, tracing a movement from the intimate world of the artist’s immediate surroundings toward more distant vistas. From the vivid colors of plants illuminated by sunlight to skies and seas suffused with the hues of dusk, familiar places are continually transformed by changing light. On the second floor, both the distance of Kim’s gaze and the scale of her painting expand. Open views of the sea extending beyond the horizon appear alongside close-up images of palm fronds and fruit, as well as the monumental The Days (2022), first presented at the Jeju Museum of Contemporary Art in 2022 and shown again in the Unlimited sector of Art Basel in Basel earlier this year. The exhibition continues in the basement, where the vivid chromatic register of daylight gives way to nature transformed by moonlight and the darkness before dawn. The palette contracts into black, white, and deep blue, while mountains, forests, and waterways emerge through restrained contours and planes. Moving through the three floors, viewers encounter the same world appearing and reappearing in different guises, continually altered by light and time.
TOWARDS: There Was Light moves beyond the familiar characterization of Kim Bohie as a painter of Jeju landscapes, recognizing her as a significant figure who has expanded the formal legacy of Korean painting into a distinctly contemporary pictorial language and forged a singular trajectory within modern and contemporary Korean art. Shaped through prolonged observation, memory, and repetition, nature in Kim’s paintings is not a fixed view but a living world that assumes a different appearance with every shift of light and time. Following the artist’s sustained attention to these transformations, the exhibition reveals how a single, still plane can hold different times and spaces, memories and sensations at once. Here, painting becomes a place from which to look again at the world we think we know and to turn our gaze beyond the visible, toward worlds not yet seen.