Kim Chong Hak

Kim Chong Hak was born in 1937 in Sinuiju, in what is now North Korea, and his family later relocated south, first to Seoul and then to Daegu during the Korean War. He studied painting at Seoul National University's College of Fine Arts, entering in 1956 and graduating in 1962, and later pursued printmaking study at the Tokyo University of the Arts from roughly 1968 to 1970 and at Pratt Institute in New York around 1977.

His early career centered on prints and abstract work shown through Korea's national exhibition system. In 1966 he won an encouragement prize at the 5th Tokyo International Print Biennale (some English-language sources give 1967).

A turning point came after Kim relocated to the Seoraksan region of Gangwon province around 1979. A 1985 solo exhibition at Won Gallery in Seoul introduced watercolors on hanji paper depicting the mountain's flowers, forests, and women, a shift that critic Lee Kyung-sung described as a decisive change in color and energy. The vivid, color-saturated style of Mount Seorak's seasons that followed became his signature. He won the 2nd Lee In-sung Art Prize in 2001, and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Gwacheon staged a retrospective of his work in 2011.

Kim's international gallery presence grew from the late 2010s, with a solo exhibition at Tomio Koyama Gallery in Tokyo in 2018, and at Galerie Perrotin in Paris in 2019, followed by a large retrospective at the Busan Museum of Art in 2020. In 2025 the High Museum of Art in Atlanta organized Kim Chong Hak, Painter of Seoraksan, described as the first American museum exhibition of his work, traveling to the Phoenix Art Museum for 2026 to 2027; Johyun Gallery also presented his work in a 2026 Frieze Los Angeles viewing room. As of 2026 he continues to work; Perrotin's artist page describes him as living and working between Busan and Seoul, South Korea.

In Korea, Kim Chong Hak has long been regarded as a major figure for turning early training in abstraction and printmaking into an intensely personal, color-driven language built around a single place, Mount Seorak. Lee Kyung-sung's 1985 writing on the shift set the terms for how Korean critics discussed the change that defined his later career, and gallery texts citing critic Oh Kwang-soo have similarly framed his work as an unusually committed defense of painting itself at a moment when the medium's relevance was in question. His recent embrace by Western institutions, including the High Museum, the Phoenix Art Museum, and Galerie Perrotin, has extended that reputation into an international context that is still catching up to his standing at home.

Kim Chong Hak's auction market is small and concentrated in Korea. The best-documented result is Pandemonium, a 2018 acrylic painting that sold for USD 155,700 at K Auction in Seoul; the exact sale date has not been confirmed in available records. Other tracked sales include Landscape of Mt. Seoraksan, a 2004 work that resold at Phillips Hong Kong on 27 May 2025 for USD 30,800 (a loss relative to a 2021 K Auction sale of USD 62,800), and Flowers and Grasses, a 1990 work that sold at Bonhams for USD 11,250. These figures suggest a market still finding its footing outside Korea even as his gallery and museum profile in the West has expanded rapidly since 2018.

There is no published catalogue raisonne for Kim Chong Hak, so provenance and attribution rely on gallery records and exhibition history rather than a scholarly authentication body. His auction record remains modest and thinly traded, concentrated in Korean domestic sale rooms with only a handful of comparable results outside Korea, so any single price should be read with caution rather than as a stable benchmark. His gallery representation is non-exclusive and spread across Johyun Gallery, Perrotin, Gallery Yeh, and Tomio Koyama Gallery rather than concentrated in a single house. Buyers should also note the naming variants in circulation, Kim Chong Hak, Kim Chong-Hak, and Kim Chonghak, all refer to the same artist, and that his rapidly expanding Western institutional presence since 2018 has outpaced the depth of public market data available to price his work.