"If You Change Too Much, You Lose Yourself"... Why Deokyong Kim Has Stayed True to His Own Grain for 40 Years

A Painter Who Has Spent 40 Years Asking "What Is Korean?"—Deokyong Kim
Expanding the Boundaries of Painting with Wood, Mother-of-Pearl, Charcoal, and Ash
From Personal Memory to Sea, Stars, and Universe: Cycles of Return Flow Through His Work
"An Artist Must Change, but Never Lose Their Own Center"

In front of Deokyong Kim's paintings, the body reacts before the eyes. The mother-of-pearl, still and quiet when viewed head-on, flashes when you take a step to the side, and the wood grain—which convention would conceal under layers of color—protrudes boldly from the surface. In most paintings, the ground is erased and something is shown on top. Deokyong Kim, conversely, makes you see the ground first. The time the tree lived, the light harbored by the shell, the charcoal and ash left behind after the fire—his paintings contain the life that precedes their materials.

Artist Dukyong Kim poses in front of his work during a meeting with The Asia Business Daily at ArtGroove2RT in Gangnam-gu, Seoul. 2026.9.2 Photo by Hyunmin Kim

When I met Deokyong Kim on September 3 at Art Cube 2R2 in Gangnam-gu, Seoul, his tone was gentle, but the texture of his thought was unmistakably solid. When asked, "What is Korean?" he replied, "If I knew that, I’d know everything." This response was unexpected coming from a painter who has pursued a Korean sensibility for nearly 40 years. However, the next fifty-minute conversation was almost an elaborate footnote to that single sentence. He explained that "Koreanness" cannot be captured by a few signifiers like natural beauty, mother-of-pearl, or dancheong; it is a synthesis marked by harmony, simplicity, and vitality. It is not a finished answer, but something to be discovered continuously. This is also why he titled this year's solo exhibition at Seongnam Cube Art Museum "Autogenesis"—not to use a prearranged tradition, but to let something new arise from within oneself.

The two-person exhibition "Light Resting on the Grain," featuring Deokyong Kim and Yongguk Byun at Art Cube 2R2, distills that philosophy. Kim’s surfaces are not paper or canvas, but wood. Dancheong pigment permeates, mother-of-pearl is inlaid, and sometimes the wood burns, turning to charcoal and ash. The boundaries among painting, architecture, and craft blur. Yet he is wary of being called a successor of tradition or a craftsman. "I am not a transmitter," he says. "I am a painter." For Kim, tradition is not preserved, but is used to expand the territory of painting.

Deokyong Kim, Cha-Gyeong–Space of Time (2023). This work expresses the sea and light beyond the window by applying mother-of-pearl on the wood grain. It reflects the artist’s long-standing themes of memory and homecoming by returning the mother-of-pearl from the sea back into the landscape. Mixed media of mother-of-pearl on wood, 180×240 cm. ArtCube2R2

His journey began with dissatisfaction toward art history. While studying traditional Korean painting at Seoul National University, he questioned why discussions about Korean art all stopped at Jeong Seon and An Gyeon. Does using ink and color on paper alone make a painting Korean? He traced the origins backward: before paper, there was wood, just as the structures of palaces and old houses were made of wood. In the late 1980s, he began to use wood as his pictorial surface. In the early 2000s, mother-of-pearl entered his work, inspired by memories of his mother’s shimmering hanbok and his family's mother-of-pearl wardrobe. Materials from architecture and craft crossed over into painting.

At this juncture, Kim’s ego emerges sharply. "Many artists do it now. There’s no need for me to claim I was the originator. Let art history talk about that later." It sounds humble, but the meaning is the inverse. He is not in a hurry for recognition, yet is clearly aware of what he has done first. He calls the art world's strict separation of Eastern and Western painting, or painting and craft, an "unbroken rule." And he believes he is the one who rattled that rule. Kim’s assertive self-awareness is of this type: less "I am right" and more "I stand by the things I have done."

Artist Deokyong Kim is posing in front of his artwork at ArtCube2R2 in Gangnam-gu, Seoul, during an interview with The Asia Business Daily. 2026.9.2 Photo by Hyunmin Kim

This is why it is only half-true to call his work “Korean painting that modernizes traditional materials.” The materials in Kim’s work have an origin story: the wood comes from houses, paper, and buildings; the mother-of-pearl from the sea. He says, "Don’t you think the physical substances that supported me might also long for their original home?" He treats materials not as inanimate things, but as entities that carry memories.

With this, what seemed like a transformation—the shift in his early works from images of his mother and sister, books and blankets, windows and doors to sea, glinting waves, stars, and space—now appears as an expansion. His mother was someone he wanted to lean on when life was turbulent; when her image disappeared, motherhood remained, which became the sea. The sea, in turn, was mother-of-pearl’s home. He didn’t move from "my memories" to "the universe"; rather, by pursuing a single memory to its furthest reach, the universe emerged.

Charcoal and ash follow the same principle. While burning leftover wood from his work, Kim wondered: has the tree truly vanished, or has only its name and form changed? "When something disappears from memory, its existence ends." Even when people die and become a handful of ash, we still call that remnant the person. Thus, ash and mother-of-pearl powder, too, could return to another life. Kim’s "universe" did not begin from a grand concept; it is the destination reached by following the life cycle of matter from tree to charcoal to ash to starlight.

You can sense these ideas in why he initiated this exhibition. Yongguk Byun, whom Kim first met in 1981 at Seoul National University’s College of Fine Arts, was a senior and a longtime friend. For Kim, who came up from Gwangju, the university—always blanketed in tear gas—felt unfamiliar and bleak. Byun, who enrolled in the art college after first graduating from business, was one of the few with whom Kim could really talk about painting. Decades later, when they reunited, Byun was still—and stubbornly—keeping his distance from passing trends in the art world. After Byun’s death, Kim didn’t want a conventional memorial exhibition. "A good artist should remain with us through their work, whether alive or not." For Kim, the truest way to remember a departed friend was not to eulogize him in the past tense, but to re-establish him as an artist in the present.

Although Kim speaks of purity, he is surprisingly pragmatic about the art market. He sharply criticizes the trend of hastily attaching motifs like moon jars, hanji, and mother-of-pearl to create “K-Art,” calling it "just a shell." On the other hand, he also dislikes the attitude of some so-called “museum artists” who look down on art fairs and sales. "For an artist to live with vitality, someone must collect their work," he says. A foreign collector with no connection to Korea paying tens of millions of won for a piece, he believes, is proof of being moved by the work. Kim neither worships nor morally denigrates the market. For him, selling his work is both survival and validation, and having work in a collection can hold the artist accountable.

Kim Deokyong, "In the Mood for Love" (2025). He revived the memories of marbles and soap bubbles from his childhood with the luster of mother-of-pearl. The scenes of childhood expand into stars and the universe on the canvas. Mother-of-pearl on wood, mixed media, 90×100 cm.

"An artist must keep changing. But if you change too much, you lose yourself." This sentiment summarizes his creative philosophy. Changing your style with every trend isn’t true growth, but a loss of identity. Thus, Kim even considers artists suddenly switching styles or abandoning their work after many years to be an issue of responsibility toward their collectors. He can be stubborn, even rigid. But perhaps it is precisely this unwavering quality that has kept old materials like wood and mother-of-pearl from becoming stale over forty years, allowing new stories to be told through them.

Recently, according to an Art Cube 2R2 representative, four of Kim’s works joined the permanent collection of the Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac in Paris, following deliberation for about a year. What Kim remembers most of this process wasn’t the praise of "Koreanness," but the curator’s persistent questions about his materials. Witnessing every detail being checked, he thought, "I should be more careful moving forward." International recognition hasn’t boosted his self-confidence so much as it has made his standards even more rigorous.

Artist Deokyong Kim is posing in front of his work at Art Cube 2R2 in Gangnam-gu, Seoul, in an interview with The Asia Business Daily. 2026.9.2 Photo by Hyunmin Kim

At the end of the interview, I asked about his views on art merchandise. Would it be all right for his paintings—reliant on tangible things like the wood grain and light of mother-of-pearl—to be turned into T-shirts or media images? He immediately corrected the word “product” to “record.” Just a few days earlier, he had worked in the studio wearing a T-shirt printed with his own painting, and said "my heart felt reverent, as if donning a ceremonial garment." It’s a slightly humorous, very Deokyong Kim moment—a painter painting while wearing his own art. His strong sense of self functions less as bravado than as discipline.

For him, Korean identity is ultimately not about style, but about returning home. Wood returns to where it came from; mother-of-pearl, to the sea; ash, to the universe. The artist, too, looks back to where he started as he moves forward. What Deokyong Kim has pursued for forty years is not the noun "Korea," but the question: how much can you be renewed without forgetting where you came from?

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.