TOWARDS: There Was Light

Gallery Hyundai is pleased to present Kim Bohie's (b. 1952) solo exhibition _TOWARDS: There Was Light_ from August 26 through October 18, 2026. 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, 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 the conventions of Western art, Kim Bohie has developed a distinctive pictorial language that brings the materials and formal principles 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 pigment, water, and glue, allowing layers of color to gradually permeate and accumulate across the surface, which creates a depth particular to her work. Her figurative compositions bring together different experiences of time: the prolonged observation of nature, its gradual transformation through memory and imagination, and its eventual reconstruction. What matters in Kim's work, therefore, is not simply what she depicts, but how time and sensation accumulated through looking and remembering re-emerge as landscape. Light is central to this process. It is both the physical condition that makes nature visible and a painterly means of revealing color, evoking the passage of time, and bringing disparate forms of life and landscape together within a single image. 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 reflects Kim's lifelong sense of gratitude and reverence for nature. While extending the significance of light beyond the spiritual symbol, it becomes a fundamental condition through which she perceives changes in the natural world and the passage of time, and translates them into painting. The title also draws on _Towards_, one of Kim's principal bodies of work. Rather than implying arrival at a fixed destination, "Towards" signifies an ongoing orientation of vision and attitude beyond what is immediately present. Her gaze moves from seed to garden, from garden to sea, and from the smallest forms of life before her to what lies beyond the horizon. In much the same way, her painting never settles into a single, definitive landscape, but remains open to what lies beyond it. _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 contemporary pictorial language and forged a distinctive 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, continually transformed by light and time. Attuned to these subtle transformations, Kim's paintings make the familiar visible anew, opening onto landscapes yet unseen.