Exhibition of Po Kim Artworks

September 4 - 7, 2011 at Donghwa Gallery in Englewood Cliffs, NJ.

Born in Korea in 1919, Po Kim studied art in Tokyo, Japan. He returned to Korea in 1946 to establish the Fine Art Department of Chosun University in Kwangju, Korea, where he was a professor and a chairman. In 1955 he came to the United States on a fellowship at the University of Illinois and eventually moved to New York City two years later. He taught briefly at New York University. In 2000 Po Kim received a Honorary Doctorate Degree of Letters from Chosun University.

Po Kim’s career as an artist spans more than six decades. Trained in academic style of painting in his student days, his works developed into abstraction in the fifties, and his mature style in the abstracted idiom. As Jeffrey Wexler, Curator of Asian Art at the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers, has acknowledged, “Kim’s contribution to American Abstract Expressionism is seen in Kim’s strong use of color inspired by Korean traditional art and for his ability to render elegantly developed linear gestures and more importantly for his concern for open space.