NEW YORK, NY.- Minjung Kim’s abstract works—the result of the patient manipulation of traditional Korean calligraphy ink and hand-dyed hanji (mulberry paper)—have garnered her global acclaim. Born in Gwangju, South Korea, Kim trained in traditional Korean painting before continuing her studies in Milan, Italy, where she developed a distinctive visual language at the intersection of Eastern sensibility and Western abstraction. Now based between France and the United States, she has cultivated a unique body of work that extends the possibilities of hanji, and has exhibited internationally for more than three decades. Minjung Kim: Ink, Paper, Fire is the first comprehensive monograph of the artist’s work, set to become the definitive text on her poetic, profoundly attentive practice.

Kim’s style is defined by her use of series—multiple works created in similar modes, all bearing the same title—created in the same year or decades apart. Minjung Kim: Ink, Paper, Fire is organized not chronologically, but rather by this central practice, and features selections from over 50 series. Examples include “Phasing,” where she uses burnt paper to echo calligraphic ink lines, mounting the thin, marked paper onto a thicker backing; and “Predestination,” where she composes work from the fragments of previous “failures.” This structure highlights the mutual influence and development among different works, emphasizing Kim’s art as a continuous expression of balance and transcendence.

Minjung Kim (b. 1962) studied traditional painting East Asian painting in Seoul. Confronted with the male-dominated Korean art scene she decided in 1991 to study overseas at Milan’s Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera. There, Kim’s practice shifted to abstract paintings, then cutting and burning traditional hanji paper, disassembling and reimagining the canons of East Asian painting in favor of a meditative yet experimental process all her own.

Sam Bardaouil is a curator and museum director. Currently co-director of the Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart in Berlin, he was also curator of the 14th Taipei Biennial, and multiple national pavilions at the Venice Biennale.





Andrew Russeth is an art critic based in New York. Currently an editor at Artnet News, he has been executive editor of ARTnews and an editor at Surface and The New York Observer. From late 2020 to early 2024, he was based in Seoul. In 2019, he was awarded the Rabkin Prize for visual arts journalism.

Jun Hu is Assistant Professor of Chinese Art and Architecture at University of California Berkeley. His work engages with the history of Chinese architecture and its connections to other scholarly and cultural traditions, and interregional interactions between China, Japan, and Korea.

The book’s elegantly spare design gives her work the primary focus while echoing its simplicity and materiality. Image banks are punctuated with texts on different paper stocks—essays by curator Sam Bardaouil and scholar Jun Hu, and a conversation between Minjung Kim and critic Andrew Russeth conducted for this book—all of which speak to the hushed radicalism of Kim’s art in a world that demands spectacle.

Heavily illustrated, Minjung Kim: Ink, Paper, Fire includes 240 color images, including an intimate look at Kim’s practice and a celebration of the themes of her work: cross-cultural dialogue, deep textures of time and process, and a reverence for the recurrent, organic rhythms of life.