Image: Phoenix Art Museum
Phoenix Art Museum will present ‘Kim Chong Hak, Painter of Seoraksan’ in the Steele Gallery from 9 September 2026 through 21 February 2027.
The special-engagement exhibition surveys the work of South Korean painter Kim Chong Hak, who was born in Sinuji, Korea, in 1937 and is popularly known as “the painter of Seoraksan.” It includes more than 80 paintings, drawings and sketches spanning the artist’s career, as well as drawings and sketchbooks dating from the 1970s to the present. A group of recent botanical studies on Korean hanji paper, made from mulberry bark, is also included, alongside an introductory biographical video by filmmakers Jung Dawoon and Kim Jongshin of Giraffe Pictures.
Kim began working as an abstract painter in the 1960s. In the late 1970s, he settled in Gangwon Province in eastern South Korea, home to Mount Seorak, and moved away from the monochromatic painting popular in Korea at the time toward an expressive style.
The exhibition is organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, and curated by Michael Rooks, Wieland Family Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. Its Phoenix presentation is coordinated by Colin Pearson, Curator of Asian Art.
