Lot 558: Kim Tchah-sup (B. 1940)

PI's window, 2004
Signed and dated Tchah Sub 2004; titled, dated and signed T.S. Kim on stretcher
Acrylic and Chinese ink on canvas
22 1/4 x 71 13/16in. (56.5 x 182.5cm.)

Kim took his first print subject--fields of harsh stones in Lake Paldang, near Seoul--from photos he took before he left Korea for the United States in 1974. He used them for his silkscreen print "Situation," 1970, illustrated in the catalogue of his exhibition at Marronnier Art Center, Korean Culture and Arts Foundation (cat. no. 4). Kim used the same subject in other oil paintings. The painting here shows a field of stones the artist discovered in the pristine Rangeley Lakes region near Roxbury, Maine in 2004. Kim's recent work explores the symbolic relationship between the natural world and (pi), a transcendental number used to express ratios in mathematics, physics and chemistry.

The artist was born in Yamaguchi Prefecture, Japan and his family moved to Gyeongju, Korea in 1944. He graduated from Seoul National University in 1963 and received his MFA from Pratt Institute in 1976 under a John D. Rockefeller 3rd Fund Fellowship. He had one-person exhibitions at the Associated American Artists Gallery, New York, in 1977, the Space Gallery, Seoul, in 1979 and 1984, the Iteza Gallery, Kyoto, in 1986 and the Gallery Hyundai, Seoul, in 1993, Marronnier Art Center, Korean Culture and Arts Foundation, Seoul, in 2002, and in the "Lee Joongsub Award Show" at the Choson Il-bo Museum, Seoul, in 2003. His work was exhibited in "Acquisitions '73-'76," the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in "30 years of American printmaking," the Brooklyn Museum in 1974 and "Six Artists from Korea," Grace Borgenicht Gallery, New York, in 1995. Kim's work is in the collections of the Ho-Am Museum, Seoul, the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Kwachon, Korea, the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Brooklyn Museum and the Cincinnati Museum of Art, among others.

A print by Kim Tchah-sup from the Estate of Blanchette H. Rockefeller was sold in these Rooms, 27 April, 1994, lot 104.

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