Seoul Kim

Seoul Kim (born 1983, Daegu, South Korea; formerly Sohee Kim) is a contemporary Korean intaglio printmaker whose mature work consists of large-format colour etchings combining chine collé and hand colouring, depicting the everyday social architecture of urban life — subways, platforms, merry-go-rounds, crowds at rush hour, the heaping ephemera of the city. She belongs to the cohort of younger Korean artists who completed their full graduate and postgraduate education in Japan, and her practice is shaped at every level by the bilingual Korea-Japan training that frames it.

Kim earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts at Hong-ik University in Seoul, the principal Korean art school for the postwar generation, before moving to Tokyo for her advanced training. At Tama Art University, one of Japan's most established private fine-arts academies and a magnet institution for international printmaking students throughout the 2000s and 2010s, she completed both her Master of Fine Arts and her doctorate. Tama Bidai's printmaking department is a significant node in the international intaglio circuit and trained Kim in the systematic approach to copperplate etching, mezzotint, and chine collé that characterises her published work.

Kim's mature etchings are colour intaglios run through with chine-collé inserts and selectively hand-coloured after printing — a hybrid procedure that gives each impression its individual character even within an edition. The technique allows her to layer transparent washes of colour over the etched line drawing in a way that recalls Edo-period polychrome ukiyo-e in its tonal complexity while remaining grounded in the European intaglio tradition. Editions are typically pulled in groups of ten to twenty, larger than typical Korean studio output and consistent with the Tama Bidai print-department production scale.

The subjects across her catalogue at Gallery No.85 (Seattle) — the principal gallery handling her work in the United States — circle around contemporary urban experience treated with comedic exaggeration. The 'Subway' suite (2007 'A Morning Subway,' 2010 'Subway I,' 'Subway II,' and 'Platform') stages commuters at scale and in volumes that turn ordinary transit into surreal social tableau. 'Sick of People' (2007), 'Heap of Remainders 1' (2009), 'Interruption' (2014), 'Merry Go Round II' (2015), and 'Way Home' (2015) extend the urban-comedy vocabulary into longer single-image compositions. 'Brush' (2015) is a small-format still life of a calligrapher's brush, the only piece in the catalogue that turns inward to studio practice.

Kim's practice has been recognised through international print competitions including the 2015 International Print Triennial in Krakow, one of the leading platforms for contemporary intaglio worldwide. Her prints are held in collections in Korea, Japan, and the United States. She has also exhibited within the Stanford University Department of Art programme alongside other Tama-trained graduate printmakers, and her work circulates through Gallery No.85 (formerly Davidson Galleries) in Seattle as her principal U.S. representation.

Within the contemporary East-Asian printmaking landscape Kim represents a particular position: a Korean artist whose technical training and stylistic vocabulary are predominantly Japanese, who works in a Western intaglio tradition (etching) augmented by an Asian hybrid procedure (chine collé and hand colouring), and whose subjects circle around the cosmopolitan urban experience common to both Seoul and Tokyo. The hybrid character of her practice — Korean-born, Japan-trained, working internationally in colour etching with chine collé — exemplifies the cross-pollinated state of East-Asian contemporary printmaking in the 2010s and 2020s.