Kim Eok

Kim Eok (김억, born 1956) is a South Korean woodcut printmaker who has worked in the medium for more than four decades, producing large-scale topographic and panoramic landscape woodcuts that document the natural spaces, scenic sites, and cultural heritage of the Korean peninsula, while also addressing the rapid changes brought by industrialization, urbanization, and the disappearance of rural areas and natural environments.

Kim's pictorial vocabulary is distinctive within the contemporary Asian woodcut field. Rather than working in the close-up, single-subject mode that characterizes much contemporary Korean and Japanese woodcut, he produces panoramic compositions that compress the visual characteristics of a location through the integration of field sketches, photographs, and various related images. The resulting prints display features that resemble traditional Korean true-view landscape paintings (jin-gyeong sansu), Joseon-period old maps, and aerial photographs simultaneously -- a synthesis that gives his prints both ethnographic specificity and an atemporal compositional structure.

His approach stands in contrast to the Western landscape tradition's emphasis on one-point perspective and detailed observational realism. Kim's woodcuts instead pursue the abstract concept of 'gyeong' (scenery) -- the holistic atmospheric quality of a place rather than its individual visual elements -- drawing on the traditional Korean ink-landscape vocabulary while translating it into the carved-and-printed surface of the woodblock.

In 2020 Kim held a solo invitational exhibition, 'Kim Eok's National Land Epic (국토서사),' at the Jincheon County Saenggeo Print Museum (진천군립생거판화미술관) in Chungcheongbuk-do, presenting a sustained body of work documenting the Korean territorial landscape. The museum, which opened in 2010 as a regional public institution dedicated to printmaking, is one of the few public museums in Korea devoted to the medium.

Kim was also among the artists selected for 'Debordering: Woodcut Printmaking Practice in Inter-Asian Context,' held at the University Art Museum of the Tokyo University of the Arts (the Chinretsukan Gallery, April--May 2023), a recent international survey of contemporary Asian woodcut that brought together artists and collectives from across East and Southeast Asia, including Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Indonesia.

This Kim Eok (b. 1956) should not be confused with the early-twentieth-century Korean poet Kim Eok (김억, born 1896, pen name Anseo), the literary mentor of the poet Kim Sowol; the two share a romanized name but are otherwise unrelated.