Unearthing Korea’s forgotten Surrealists

Kim Young-hwan's "Landscape of Self-portrait" (1962) / Courtesy of the artist's family

Surrealism officially took root in Paris in 1924, with the publication of poet Andre Breton’s “Surrealist Manifesto.” More than an artistic rebellion, it sought to liberate the human spirit from the chains of reason and tradition, both profoundly shaken in the aftermath of World War I. It instead turned to the raw, untamed visions of the subconscious, and within a few years blossomed into an international movement of intellectual and political defiance.

In Korea’s art world, the first stirrings of Surrealism surfaced in the late 1930s, taken up by artists like Kim Whanki, Lee Jung-seop and Yoo Young-kuk — students trained in Japan who returned home bearing radical new visions. Yet, under the heavy shadow of 1910-45 Japanese colonization and the 1950-53 Korean War, these early experiments failed to crystallize into a lasting movement and gradually faded into obscurity. For a time, Surrealism in Korea was even treated as something that had never existed at all.

But within that prolonged absence, there were individuals who carried the spirit forward silently and in solitude.

Installation view of "Surrealism and Korean Modern Art" at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art's Deoksugung branch in Seoul / Newsis

Installation view of Kim Chong-ha's oil paintings at the "Surrealism and Korean Modern Art" exhibit / Newsis

It is to these six overlooked figures that the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA) now turns its gaze in the exhibition, “Surrealism and Korean Modern Art.”

“Korean art history has focused its attention to other avant-garde movements of the time — Art Informel, experimental art and ‘Minjung’ art — while Surrealism, considered a peripheral practice, remained largely unknown,” said curator Park Hye-sung. Minjung art was a sociopolitical artistic practice that emerged during the democracy movement of the 1970s and 1980s.

It took seven years for Park to bring the show to life, unearthing paintings and archival materials, many of which had remained tucked away in family storage after the six artists’ deaths without ever seeing the light of day.

The "Surrealism and Korean Modern Art" exhibition at MMCA Deoksugung opens with a broader constellation of artists who, though not consciously aligned with Surrealism, nevertheless reveal its legacy in their work. Courtesy of MMCA

But before delving into these outliers, the exhibition at MMCA Deoksugung interestingly opens with a broader constellation of creatives who, though not consciously aligned with Surrealism, nevertheless reveal its legacy in their work.

These artists adopted key techniques of the movement — automatism, collage, double image, frottage and more — to explore the unconscious and alternate dimensions of reality.

Among those featured are modernist icons like Lee Jung-seop, Lee Qoe-de, Chun Kyung-ja and Park Re-hyun, whose early canvas works are steeped in mythic imagination. Equally striking are the uncanny black-and-white still lifes and collages by photographers Jung Hae-chang, Limb Eung-sik and Koo Bohn-chang, where the surreal lingers in the fabric of everyday life.

In the uncanny black-and-white still lifes by photographer Limb Eung-sik, the surreal lingers in the fabric of everyday life. Yonhap

Once visitors complete their promenade through the garden of works touched by surrealist tendencies, they are led to the museum’s second floor, where six unfamiliar names quietly come into the spotlight: Kim Chong-nam, Kim Uk-kyu, Kim Chong-ha, Shin Young-heon, Kim Young-hwan and Park Gwang-ho.

Kim Chong-nam (1914-86) studied under Ichiro Fukuzawa, the painter who first ushered Surrealism into Japan. In 1950, Kim married a Japanese woman and became a naturalized citizen, adopting the name Hideo Manabe. The weight of discrimination against ethnic Koreans in postwar Japan compelled him to conceal his origins, and it was only on his deathbed that he confessed the truth to his two sons.

"My Landscape" (1980) by Kim Chong-nam, also known as Hideo Manabe / Courtesy of the artist's family

Kim’s canvases teem with unruly flora and fantastical creatures, half-hidden within tangled thickets. In their uncanny stillness, one senses not only the eerie pulse of nature but something deeper — the lingering ache of a man who had to live his life behind a borrowed name.

Similarly, Kim Uk-kyu (1911-90), born in South Hamgyong Province in North Korea, fled south at the outbreak of the Korean War. Because his earlier career in the North became a stigma in the South, he had to paint portraits for soldiers on a U.S. military base to put food on the table.

Kim Uk-kyu's untitled painting from the 1970s / Courtesy of the artist's family

Of his 400 surviving works, most bear no title, no date, no signature. They were never meant to be seen, much less sold. Cut off entirely from the art world and society at large, Kim painted in near-total isolation. His first solo exhibition came only after his death, organized by his eldest son in 1991.

Park Gwang-ho's "Fantasy of Peninsular" (1970s) / Courtesy of MMCA

Alone with his canvases, he conjured strange beasts and deformed human figures that hover somewhere between dream and myth. For a man marked by trauma, solitude and poverty, painting was his salvation.

The styles of other creatives enrich the exhibition’s roster — Kim Chong-ha (1918-2011), with his dreamlike eroticism; Park Gwang-ho (1932-2000), whose geometric clusters form strange, at times fetishistic, constellations; Kim Young-hwan (1928-2011), who summoned Daliesque landscapes; and Shin Young-heon (1923-95), who uses complex double images to reflect on a Korea left in ruins by war and division.

“Surrealism and Korean Modern Art” runs through July 6 at MMCA Deoksugung.

Installation view of Shin Young-heon's double-image canvas works at "Surrealism and Korean Modern Art" / Courtesy of MMCA