Myonghi Kang

Myonghi Kang’s (b. 1947, Daegu, South Korea) vibrant cosmic paintings project a pure sensibility without boundaries. Through her canvases, the artist expresses a view of the natural world that vacillates between emptiness and fullness in myriad manifestations of colours, marks, and shapes. Myonghi’s paintings radiate joy and powerfully transform their surrounding space. The artist is also a prolific poet; these two mediums allow the artist to capture the world around her, re-constructing its cartography through metaphysical forms of representation.

Developing an interest in art from an early age, Myonghi has long examined her relationship with nature which emerges as a divine silhouette in her paintings. Throughout her life, she has also been a scholar of the philosophical and technical study of traditional Eastern paintings.

From the Gobi Desert to the glaciers of Patagonia, Myonghi has travelled around the world seeking aesthetic inspiration. Travel is a special way for Myonghi to rediscover the essence of painting. Often travelling alone with only a few brushes and some canvas, she returns from her journeys to create large-scale paintings capturing their mesmerising landscapes and memories. She has also travelled extensively around Europe, observing global cultures that continue to inform her work and imbue them with a multinational perspective.

For much of her life, Myonghi has divided her time between South Korea and France. She studied Fine Arts at the College of Fine Arts, Seoul National University. Myonghi immigrated to France in 1972 and first settled in near Aix-en Provence, in a small village named Gardanne. There, she learned the French language but also actively practiced and studied fine art. During her early years in France, Myonghi paintings depicted her memories from Korea and reflected the political climate she lived in before leaving the country: “My body was in France but my mind and soul were still in Korea.”

She soon settled in Paris in a studio near Place Clichy with her husband Setaik. After a few years in the French capital, she started painting the urban street scenes of Paris and the surrounding nature when she moved to Quai de la Loire in the 1980s. Located in the 19th arrondissement, the artist embraced its tranquil canals in the heart of the city. As she observed, she woke up each morning and was amazed by the beauty of Paris that she could see from her studio’s window. Since then, she started working with and embracing the light. She took a brush every morning and painted from the window. According to the hour of the day, to the vary light and weather conditions, a painting could continuously evolve with some being completed over several years.

After Myonghi started exhibiting her ethereal paintings, she befriended renowned artists, poets and writers, including Zao Wou-Ki, Piotr Kowalski, Gilles Aillaud, Alain Jouffroy and Dominique de Villepin. Her works gained widespread recognition in the late 1980s following several international solo exhibitions and poetry recitals, including shows at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (1986), the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul (1989) and Beijing Art Museum of Imperial City in China (2011). In 1981, she and her husband Setaik were the founders of the Musée de Séoul in Seoul, the first Museum of Art in South Korea. The artist also participated in the exhibition and symposium Devant, le futur, as part of the World Expo held in Daejeon, South Korea in 1993.