HUN KYU KIM: PRAYERS
PERROTIN Seoul is pleased to present The Prayers, a solo exhibition by Korean artist Hun Kyu Kim.
November 07 – December 20, 2025
Expanding upon the world of animal collectives that he has long explored, this exhibition sheds new light on the realms of faith and belief. Born in Seoul in 1986, Kim graduated from the Department of Oriental Painting at Seoul National University. Drawing inspiration from Goryeo Buddhist paintings and traditional silk-coloring techniques, he has developed an allegorical visual language that reflects human desire and contradiction through the depiction of animals. After completing his MFA at the Royal College of Art in London, Kim has continued to work primarily in London, presenting a unique painterly world that moves fluidly between Eastern and Western visual idioms.
In Kim’s paintings, chaos and order, inside and outside, one belief and another ceaselessly collide. As viewers engage with his work, they are prompted to confront fundamental questions about humanity—What is right? How should we live? Rather than seeking definitive answers, the artist persistently reexamines these questions through the act of painting. Through this exhibition—where color, belief, and pictorial structure intertwine—viewers are invited to contemplate the symbolic narratives that compose Kim’s universe, and to reflect on the fragile balance of convictions that shape our world.
When one initially encounters the works of Hun Kyu Kim, so densely packed with various animals going head to head, it can be difficult to locate much apparent affection for the world writ large. This is a place where beings seemingly unconstrained by boundaries of species—rabbits, pigs, parrots, salmon—engage in raw, real-time contests of survival and predation. Indeed, what strikes the viewer first is the fact that none of these animals are actually poised to become the absolute victor or loser; rather, they remain trapped in a state of useless struggle. Though they are clearly suffering, it would appear that these creatures simply cannot stop fighting. And while, upon closer examination, one discovers bits of absurd humor and mischievous wit hidden amidst some of these cute brawls, a lingering sense of déjà vu bleeds across one’s vision, evoking the human world.
The stories of this world are depicted with such precision as to feel almost hallucinatory, and in this sense, appear to map rather directly onto the artist’s own struggle with his work. This also reflects Hun Kyu Kim’s intense attitude and approach to painting itself. As a child, the artist found himself entranced by the delicate yet elaborate expressiveness of Buddhist paintings, and this, in turn, led him to undertake the practice of gongpilhwa (工筆畵)—a technique of silk painting in which one uses layers of color to depict one’s object. Along the way, Kim came to believe that using extremely detailed brushwork to construct these worlds we call paintings was a practice that carried its own power. This belief, in turn, reached a turning point of sorts during his time in the United Kingdom, where he first encountered a number of works from the Renaissance period and came to see that the special force he had thought to be specific to traditional East Asian painting techniques had also been achieved, albeit in a different dimension, by the devotional painters of 15th-century Europe. These Renaissance painters’ delicate brushstrokes recreated reality, Kim noted, “as if a soul were contained within the painting, as if the painter had been painting for his life”—and this, along with gongpilhwa, has come to form the very grammar of Hun Kyu Kim’s artistic world.