Untitled

Kim Sou was one of a small number of Korean artists who were able to travel to Paris in the 1950s. He stayed for twelve years. His experiments there shook off his early grounding as a realist painter to gain traction as an abstract painter, eventually settling on a combination of the figural and the abstract suspended in a field of color. Kim called his art Harmonism, likening it to the dualities of existence and aesthetics.

Kim Sou was born in Hamheung in northern Korea. He had his first one-person exhibition at the Tonghwa Gallery, Seoul, in 1949. In 1955, he went to Paris to study oil painting at the Academie de la Grande Chaumière and exhibited regularly in the Salon d'Automne thereafter. In 1966, he had a one-person exhibition at Press Center Art Gallery, Seoul. His paintings were exhibited at the Woodmere Gallery in Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania, in 1970, while he was instructor in the Department of Education, Philadelphia Art Museum. He also taught at Moore College of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. In 1979, he participated in "Korean Modern Art of the 1950s" sponsored by the Korean Modern Art Gallery, Seoul. Kim was featured in a major exhibition and symposium on Cubism in Asia that traveled to the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul, the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, and the Singapore Art Museum between 2005 and 2006.