The 21st-century city,
reinterpreted as landscape
He translates the structure and colour of the modern city onto the canvas.An urban painting rooted in Incheon — a reinterpretation of landscape.
The city, as painting —
structure and colour on a surface
Kim Gyu-hak is a mid-career Korean artist based in Incheon. He graduated from the Graduate School of Art at Chung-Ang University, in the Department of Plastic Arts, and has built a practice centred on a single subject: the city. Across his work, the modern urban landscape is reinterpreted through the language of painting — its structure, its grid, its colour.
His practice spans twelve solo exhibitions and some 250 group shows. The 2024 solo exhibition 21st Century City (KMJ Art Gallery, Incheon) is among the most recent, part of a sustained inquiry into how the contemporary city can be held within a frame.
That inquiry has a name in his recent work: pixel — a reinterpretation of landscape. Where a city dissolves into the smallest units of perception, Kim reassembles it as a painted surface, neither documentary record nor pure abstraction but something in between: the city seen as both structure and sensation.
His works are held in major public collections — the MMCA Art Bank, the Gwangju Museum of Art, the Yeoju Museum of Art “Ryeo,” the Incheon Foundation for Arts & Culture Art Bank, the Yangpyeong Museum of Art, the Gyeonggi Cultural Foundation, the Anguk Cultural Foundation, and Samtan Art Mine, among others. He joins this campaign not as a subject of its cause but as a fellow artist in solidarity.
Major themes
- 1
The 21st-century city
The modern city as primary subject — its structure and colour translated onto the painted surface.
- 2
pixel — reinterpreting landscape
A landscape resolved into its smallest units, then reassembled as a painted surface — neither pure record nor pure abstraction.
- 3
Rooted in Incheon
Based in Incheon across 12 solo and some 250 group exhibitions — a regional practice with national reach.
The artist's timeline
- 2018Grand Prize, Incheon Art Exhibition.
- 2019Grand Prize, Angyeon-sarang National Art Exhibition; Best Award, Indépendant KOREA.
- 2023Selected for the Incheon Foundation for Arts & Culture art-creation grant and the Seoul Foundation for Arts & Culture senior-artist support.
- 2024Solo exhibition 〈21st Century City〉 (KMJ Art Gallery, Incheon); selected again for the Incheon art-creation grant.
- 2024Group exhibition 〈Art·T Incheon〉, Incheon Foundation Art Bank curated show (Namdong Culture Center); the acquisitions show 〈pixel: a reinterpretation of landscape〉, Yeoju Museum of Art 'Ryeo.'
- 2025Group exhibition ASYAAF (Culture Station Seoul 284).
Selected exhibitions & collections
- Solo exhibition: 〈21st Century City〉, KMJ Art Gallery, Incheon (2024) — one of twelve solo shows
- Group exhibitions: ASYAAF, Culture Station Seoul 284 (2025); 〈Art·T Incheon〉 Art Bank curated show, Namdong Culture Center (2024)
- Acquisitions show: 〈pixel: a reinterpretation of landscape〉, Yeoju Museum of Art “Ryeo” (2024)
- Public collections: MMCA Art Bank; Gwangju Museum of Art; Yeoju Museum of Art "Ryeo"; Incheon Foundation for Arts & Culture Art Bank; Yangpyeong Museum of Art; Gyeonggi Cultural Foundation; Anguk Cultural Foundation; Samtan Art Mine, among others
- Awards: Grand Prize, Angyeon-sarang National Art Exhibition (2019); Best Award, Indépendant KOREA (2019); Grand Prize, Incheon Art Exhibition (2018)
Three essays —
on the work and the city
1One subject, sustained — the city
Some artists range widely; others choose a single subject and stay with it until it opens. Kim Gyu-hak belongs to the second kind. Trained at the Graduate School of Art at Chung-Ang University in plastic arts, he has held twelve solo exhibitions and shown in some 250 group exhibitions — and across that span, the city has remained his constant.
The 2024 solo exhibition 21st Century City at KMJ Art Gallery in Incheon names the project plainly. Not a city of nostalgia or ruin, but the contemporary city as it is now: a dense field of structure, surface, and colour. Kim does not document it so much as translate it — into the slower, more deliberate language of paint.
2pixel — a reinterpretation of landscape
The title of the 2024 acquisitions show at the Yeoju Museum of Art “Ryeo” — pixel: a reinterpretation of landscape — points to the formal logic of the recent work. A pixel is the smallest unit of a screen image; landscape is one of the oldest subjects in painting. Kim sets the two against each other.
The result is a surface that holds both registers at once: read closely, it resolves into discrete units of mark and colour; stepped back, it gathers into the recognisable structure of a city. The painting becomes a place where the digital grain of contemporary vision and the slow accumulation of painted landscape meet — neither pure record nor pure abstraction, but the city held as both structure and sensation.
3From Incheon, into public collections
Kim's practice is rooted in Incheon, and that rootedness has been rewarded close to home — the Grand Prize at the Incheon Art Exhibition in 2018, and repeated selection for the Incheon Foundation for Arts & Culture art-creation grant. In 2019 he took the Grand Prize at the Angyeon-sarang National Art Exhibition and the Best Award at Indépendant KOREA, widening the recognition beyond his region.
That recognition is legible above all in where the work now rests. His paintings have entered the collections of the MMCA Art Bank, the Gwangju Museum of Art, the Yeoju Museum of Art “Ryeo,” the Incheon Foundation Art Bank, the Yangpyeong Museum of Art, the Gyeonggi Cultural Foundation, the Anguk Cultural Foundation, and Samtan Art Mine — public institutions that hold the work in trust for a wider public.
Across twelve solo exhibitions and some 250 group shows, Kim Gyu-hak has pursued a single question: how does the 21st-century city become a painting, and how does a painting hold the city? He joins this campaign not as a subject of its cause but as a fellow artist in solidarity — so that the artists who come after might work with the support a financial system still denies them.
Selected Works
9 works are featured here.
Kim Gyu-hak joined this campaign in solidarity with fellow artists. Every work sold flows directly into the artists' mutual-aid loan fund— a purchase becomes the next month's lifeline for an artist navigating financial exclusion today.
