Seoul Kim

Seoul Kim (born 1983, Daegu, South Korea) is a contemporary Korean printmaker whose work consists of large-format colour etchings, often finished with hand colouring, that depict the everyday social architecture of urban life — subways, platforms, merry-go-rounds, and crowds at rush hour. She belongs to a cohort of younger Korean artists who completed their graduate and postgraduate training in Japan, and her practice is shaped by that bilingual Korea–Japan education.

Kim earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts at Hong-ik University in Seoul before moving to Tokyo for advanced study. At Tama Art University, one of Japan's most established private fine-arts academies, she completed both her Master of Fine Arts and her doctorate, training in the systematic approach to copperplate etching that characterises her published work.

Her mature etchings are colour intaglios selectively hand-coloured after printing, a procedure that layers transparent washes of colour over the etched line drawing and gives each impression its own individual character. The subjects across her catalogue circle around contemporary urban experience treated with comedic exaggeration: works such as 'A Morning Subway' and 'Platform' stage commuters at a scale that turns ordinary transit into surreal social tableau, while 'Sick of People,' 'Heap of Remainders 1,' 'Interruption,' and 'Merry Go Round II' extend the same urban-comedy vocabulary into single-image compositions. 'Brush,' a small still life of a calligrapher's brush, is the rare piece that turns inward to studio practice.

Kim's work circulates in the United States through Gallery No.85 in Seattle (formerly Davidson Galleries), her principal U.S. representation. Within the contemporary East-Asian printmaking landscape she occupies a particular position: a Korean-born, Japan-trained artist working in a Western intaglio tradition, whose subjects circle around the cosmopolitan urban experience common to both Seoul and Tokyo.