To the eyes of the West.

To the eyes of the West, the world is a drama, a progress through war and ruin and disaster to triumph and some promised land. This last hundred years, the world has thought technology would be the weapon for man’s ultimate triumph over nature. Now suddenly, so many are now so sure .

To the eyes of the East, the world is an illusion – the Budda said it , and the Brahmans also for nearly a thousand years before— an illusion of beauty and pain, but illusion only, finally, always.

The art of Heungmo Kim is an art of both worlds. The sublime beauty of the East and tragic vision of the West—the drift of flowers on a stream, of leaves falling in afternoon light, the kind of beauty someone might have seen in a dewdrop on a rose petal or on the barbed wire of a concentration camp—and the irresistible, the inevitable blackness and ruin which cannot be stopped; the death that is there at the end of everything.

The Korean flag bears the Yin-Yang symbol, sign of endless interplay of opposites. The art of Heungmo Kim is Korean; the endless interplay of beauty and tragedy; human life

Fred Martin

Dean Emeritus, San Francisco Art Institute