The Kim Tschang-Yeul Art Museum of Jeju will host “The Discovery of Text: The Aesthetics of Reality and Ideal” exhibition in its first exhibition room until July 21st.

This exhibition provides an overview of the waterdrop paintings that Kim Tschang-Yeul created in newspapers in the late 1980s and explores how text emerged as a formal element in his paintings thereafter.

After first painting waterdrops on a copy of Le Figaro in 1975, Master Kim Tschang-Yeul proceeded to paint waterdrops of various shapes and colors on newspapers from 1986 to 1989.

This exploration of characters and waterdrop compositions later evolved into the Regression series, where waterdrops were painted over the typeface of Chinese characters.

The newspapers used as backgrounds for the waterdrop paintings act as a canvas that does not reveal its own presence, transforming into the surface of the waterdrops created by the artist, and thus, lending an element of fantasy to the waterdrops.

The black and white of the newspapers emphasizes the shadows and reflections of the waterdrops, making them appear more lifelike.

Lee Jong-hoo, the director of the Art Museum, said, “This exhibition showcases how text began and was used in Kim Tschang-Yeul’s waterdrop paintings,” and expressed his hope that “it will be an opportunity to discover a new aesthetic world in the relationship between text and waterdrops in Master Kim Tschang-Yeul’s works.”