South Korea’s chainsaw artist Kim Yun Shin carves a name for herself at 91

Paju, South Korea – South Korean sculptor Kim Yun Shin wields a chainsaw with a quiet focus, refining a craft the 91-year-old has honed over decades spent far from home.

Long overlooked in her home country, Kim has more recently gained recognition as a pioneering artist, featuring in a sweeping retrospective at South Korea’s esteemed Hoam Museum of Art.

The solo exhibition, titled Two Be One, is the institution’s first since its founding in 1982 to spotlight a woman artist, and includes some of her signature abstract sculptures hewn from hardwood with her tool of choice.

“The saw is my body,” Kim told AFP in her studio in Paju, a city north-west of the capital Seoul. “When I lift it and cut (the wood), it has to move exactly like me – the saw has to become me, and I have to become the saw.”

Hoam is exhibiting about 170 of Kim’s sculptures and paintings, reflecting her reverence for nature and blending spirituality with meditations on existence, material and form.

Born in 1935 in Wonsan, now in North Korea, she grew up playing alone in the countryside, talking to trees and rice paddies, and making eyeglasses out of sorghum stalks.

At the time, Korea was under Japanese colonial rule. Kim saw her elder brother disappear after joining the independence movement, and pine trees in her town cut down for fuel.

“Those trees were my friends,” she said, recalling the pain of seeing them uprooted – and her drive to salvage and transform them into works of sculpture.

“I think I wanted them to endure – to keep living on within that (art) form. Maybe that’s why I’ve loved working with wood so much.”

Chainsaw carving

Kim’s family fled south during the horrors of the Korean War (1950 to 1953), and she later studied in France before returning to become an art professor in Seoul.

South Korea was then under a brutal military dictatorship. The authorities held artists in suspicion: a friend of Kim’s was interrogated simply for using red, a colour associated with North Korean communism.

“Women, in particular, were virtually invisible,” she said, noting that her superiors would comment on the length of her skirt and tell her to refrain from smoking on college campuses.

At 48, drawn by the abundant trees in Argentina, she made the unusual choice to move to the South American nation, then just restoring democracy after a dictatorship of its own.

She ended up staying for 40 years, taking up chainsaw carving.

Kim focused on dense, durable wood such as palo santo and “algarrobo”, and also worked with quarries in Mexico and Brazil, experimenting with stone sculpture using materials such as onyx and sodalite.

She managed to forge her “own artistic world, nourished by the country’s culture and nature”, said Hoam’s senior curator Tae Hyun-sun.

Pave the way

Like many women artists of her generation, Kim has only recently gained global recognition, said Ms Rachel Lehmann, co-founder of art gallery Lehmann Maupin, which represents Kim internationally and has shown her work in London and New York.

“Her perseverance and lifelong dedication have helped pave the way for subsequent generations of women artists,” added Ms Lehmann.

Kim returned to South Korea after a major 2023 solo show in Seoul that propelled her to the Venice Biennale the following year.

Among her former mentees in Buenos Aires is Korean-Argentine film-maker Cecilia Kang, 40, an award-winning director who is now making a film about her.

As the daughter of Korean immigrants, Kang felt pressure to follow a conventional path, but Kim – whom Kang first met when she was 13 – showed her “that pursuing a life doing what one loves is possible”.

Kim, who was a war refugee, changed her name at 15 to Yun Shin – “truth and faith” – on the advice of a monk who urged her to spend her life discovering her “true colour”.

Those words have always “stayed vivid with me”, she said. “Sometimes I feel they are what have carried me through this life.” AFP