Adolph Gottlieb and Kim Whanki @ Pace Gallery, Seoul - 'The Language of Abstraction, The Universe of Emotion' Exhibition

The Language of Abstraction, The Universe of Emotion 

Adolph Gottlieb and Kim Whanki

Pace Gallery, Seoul

October 31, 2025 – January 10, 2026

Kim Whanki 

Untitled, 1967 

Oil on canvas, 177 x 127 cm 

© Whanki Foundation · Whanki Museum

Pace  presents The Language of Abstraction, The Universe of Emotion, a pair of exhibitions of works by American Abstract Expressionist Adolph Gottlieb and pioneering Korean painter Kim Whanki, at its Seoul gallery. On view across two floors of the gallery, these dual presentations—organized in collaboration with the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation and the Whanki Foundation—offer viewers an opportunity to witness how two 20th century figures with different cultural and philosophical backgrounds visualized their unique perspectives and forged a universal language through abstraction.

Gottlieb’s paintings fuse intuitive shapes with bold color fields to visualize emotion and the unconscious, while Kim’s canvases employ repeated dots and refined chromatic structures to evoke an Eastern sense of meditation and cosmic order. Deeply moved by his first encounter with Gottlieb’s work in the U.S. Pavilion at the São Paulo Biennale in 1963, Kim Whanki subsequently relocated to New York, where he embarked on one of the most intense periods of his career. Immersed in the city’s dynamic art scene, he gradually eliminated figurative references from his work, refining his language into dots, lines, and planes. His restrained compositions and luminous fields of meticulously placed dots evoke skies, seas, and constellations, transforming time and space into poetic abstractions. His celebrated Dot Paintings series, completed during these years, played a key role in the introduction of Korean Modernism to the global stage. Pace’s exhibition of Kim’s work from the late 1960s to the early 1970s focuses on the development of his Dot Paintings from structural compositions using crosses and quadrants (Sibjagudo).

A central figure of the New York School alongside Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb was at the vanguard of American Abstract Expressionism. His Pictographs of the 1940s used an all-over grid structure and invented symbols to give form to the unconscious, and in the 1950s he developed his signature Burst series: paintings that juxtapose a floating orb with explosive brushwork. These compositions dramatize the tensions between order and chaos, color, and form, inviting universal and intuitive responses rather than prescribing narrative meaning. Pace’s presentation in Seoul includes a selection of works produced by Adolph Gottlieb during the 1960s and 1970s, including the large-scale painting Expanding (1962), along with canvases from his Imaginary Landscapes series, which utilize the form of landscape painting to include unlimited perception.

Though their practices were rooted in distinct cultural contexts, Kim and Gottlieb are connected by a shared pursuit of universality—using color, symbol, and structure to explore humanity, the cosmos, and the realm of emotion. The Language of Abstraction, The Universe of Emotion is conceived as a dialogue, where the visual and emotional resonances between their works illuminate the boundless possibilities of abstraction and its enduring significance in art history.

Adolph Gottlieb (b. 1903, New York; d. 1974, New York) is recognized as a key figure of the New York School. Initially informed by Italian Renaissance painting, Impressionism, and the European avant-garde, Gottlieb became an advocate of abstraction from the 1930s onward, notably organizing the protest of an exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 1950, for which he and a group of fellow artists became known as the Irascibles. Producing paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture, and tapestries, Adolph Gottlieb developed an aesthetic vocabulary from Jungian theory, underpinned by aspects of automatism, primitivism, and Surrealism. He continued to refine these stylistic means throughout his career, pursuing images that evoke an immediate and visceral impact on the viewer, through his series of Pictographs, Imaginary Landscapes, and Bursts.

Kim Whanki (b. 1913, Jeollanam-do, Korea; d. 1974, New York) is recognized as one of the pioneers of abstract modernism in South Korea during the twentieth century. The artist studied at Nihon University, Tokyo, from 1933 to 1936, a period during which he began exploring abstraction. From 1946 to 1950, he served as a professor in the Department of Western Painting at Seoul National University, and from 1952 to 1955 as professor and dean of the Department of Western Painting at Hongik University, Seoul. He was appointed as President of the Fine Arts Association in 1963.

PACE SEOUL

267 Itaewon-ro, Yongsan-gu, Seoul

www.pacegallery.com

The Making of Modern Korean Art: The Letters of Kim Tschang-Yeul, Kim Whanki, Lee Ufan, and Park Seo-Bo, 1961–1982 @ Tina Kim Gallery, New York

The Making of Modern Korean Art 

The Letters of Kim Tschang-Yeul, Kim Whanki, Lee Ufan, and Park Seo-Bo, 1961–1982

Tina Kim Gallery, New York

May 5 - June 21, 2025

Tina Kim Gallery presents The Making of Modern Korean Art: The Letters of Kim Tschang-Yeul, Kim Whanki, Lee Ufan, and Park Seo-Bo, 1961–1982. Organized in conjunction with the launch of a landmark new publication of the same title, the exhibition brings to life the personal and intellectual exchanges between four pioneering artists who shaped the trajectory of modern Korean art during the transformative decades following the Korean War. Through the presentation of significant paintings made by all four artists during this period, as well as archival materials, photography, and ephemera, the exhibition will make manifest the artistic dialogues and debates that guided the global emergence of Korean modern art.

In the aftermath of the Korean War (1950–53), amid political upheaval and limited institutional support, Korean artists faced the urgent challenge of redefining their cultural landscape and articulating their collective trauma and existential dislocation. Many turned to abstraction as a means of forging a distinctly Korean modernity, one that resisted both Western ideologies and inherited aesthetic traditions. Among Korea’s earliest abstractionists, Kim Whanki evolved from semi-abstracted depictions of moon jars and plum blossoms to the sublime all-over dot paintings of his New York period, blending a Korean sensibility with global avant-garde influences. Park Seo-Bo and Kim Tschang-Yeul, deeply influenced by European Informel, produced early works characterized by thick impasto, raw surfaces, and material experimentation. This shared language laid the foundation for their later iconic series: Kim Tschang-Yeul turned to the meditative precision of his Waterdrop series, reflecting Taoist principles of ego dissolution; while Park Seo-Bo developed his Ecriture series, defined by its monochromatic palette and a rigorous focus on repetition, process, and discipline. Lee Ufan, initially a key figure in the Mono-ha movement in Japan, transitioned in the early 1970s to his From Point and From Line series, merging material restraint with philosophical inquiry in simple, deliberate brush strokes that evoke Eastern calligraphy. By the mid-1970s, each artist had developed a singular visual idiom: distinct yet unified by a shared ambition to advance Korean art on the global stage. Key works from these formative series will be featured in the forthcoming exhibition.

Though geographically dispersed, the four artists remained closely connected through a decades-long correspondence. In the absence of a robust cultural infrastructure in Korea, their letters became essential conduits for critical exchange, exhibition planning, and mutual support. Park Seo-Bo and Kim Tschang-Yeul, lifelong friends and collaborators, played a pivotal role in organizing the second Hyundae Fine Art Exhibition in 1957 and corresponded tirelessly to coordinate Korea’s participation in the 1961 Paris Biennale. Lee Ufan and Park Seo-Bo, who began exchanging letters after their joint inclusion in a 1968 group exhibition in Tokyo, became key mediators between the Korean and Japanese art scenes; and Kim Whanki, a generation older, served as a mentor figure, encouraging Kim Tschang-Yeul to apply for Rockefeller Fellowship funding that ultimately brought him to New York in 1965. From Seoul, Tokyo, Paris, and New York, the four artists exchanged ideas, critiques, and reflections on both the practical and philosophical challenges of working from the periphery of the global art world. Their letters not only offer an unprecedented window into their artistic development but also reveal a collective commitment to building a Korean modernism that could engage—on its own terms—with the broader narratives of postwar art.

The Making of Modern Korean Art foregrounds these correspondences—newly translated, previously unpublished, and reproduced at actual size—as critical primary documents in the story of Korean modernism. Published by Gregory R. Miller & Co., the book is co-edited by Yeon Shim Chung, Professor of Art History and Theory at Hongik University, and Doryun Chong, Artistic Director and Chief Curator of M+, Hong Kong, and features a contribution by Kyung An, Curator of Asian Art at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Beyond the letters, the volume marks a major contribution to the field as a comprehensive English-language survey of Korean abstraction, spanning the period from the birth of Korean Informel to the formation of Dansaekhwa.

TINA KIM GALLERY

525 West 21st Street, New York, NY 10011

tinakimgallery.com