Kim Bohie Korea, b. 1952

Kim Bohie, a prominent figurative painter, has continued to explore bringing modernity to Korean painting through her exquisite visual languages that she has developed while researching the traditional styles of Korean and Western paintings. Kim Bohie delicately expresses beauty and purity of nature closely observed in daily life such as plants, gardens, seas, and surrounding sceneries. Embracing the composition and perspective of Western painting, she continues to work on an organic combination of each element in her work by accepting Eastern approaches that emphasize vividness and harmony. 

At her early phases, Kim focused on experimenting traditional painting techniques with colored ink to depict landscapes, human figures and common still life objects from a moderated and contemplative perspective. From the early 2000s, she began to establish a pictorial landscape painting called Kim Bohie-style dot painting by applying more colors on typical ink landscape paintings. Her investigation into possibilities in the bird’s eye view composition and the two-dimensional interpretation in landscapes made a new sort of extension in Korean traditional paintings. Since Kim moved and settled in Jeju Island, she has captured Jeju’s nature in her exotic description with green and blue tones, achieving further transitions in her work. In her recent works, she freely deals with canvas, Korean paper, ink, and acrylic regardless of materials, presenting a series of tropical landscapes and extremely enlarged portraits of seeds and plants.

Kim Bohie lives and works in Jeju, Korea. Kim holds BFA in Korean Painting and MFA in Fine Art at Ewha Womans University. She was a professor and a museum director until 2017, and is now an honorary professor at the same university. Since 1980, she has been the subject of numerous exhibitions in Korea and abroad. Her work has been featured in exhibitions in CAN Foundation (2021), Kumho Museum of Art (2020), Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art (2015), National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art(MMCA), Korea (2014), Museum SAN (2014), Seoul Museum of Art (2007) and Sejong Center (2009). Her work is represented in the collections of MMCA Korea, Seoul Museum of Art, and etc.