한국 전통예술과 문자도 ㅣ studio Kim Kyungho

Every exam season, someone close to you is working hard and hoping quietly. Siheom-bok is the blessing the artist drew for them. It is a wish that studying hard, sitting the exam and passing all belong to one road. The painting reads from top to bottom, and Kim Kyungho explains each part. Three Circles for First Place At the very top, three small circles hold "one" in three forms: the Korean word 일, the numeral 1, and the Chinese character 一. Together they carry a wish to pass in first place. The Frame and the Passing Prize Along the top edge of the frame, the Korean characters for "pass" (합격) appear on the left and right. The Chinese character in the middle, 賞 ("prize"), joins them into "passing prize" (합격상). Down the sides, you can read a "합격증" (pass certificate) on the left and the word "국가" ("national") on the right. They stand for the national civil-service exams and any other test a person might hope to p...

Six hundred years of munjado gave Korean folk painters a fairly settled visual vocabulary: cranes for longevity, lotus blossoms for purity, waves and clouds for the movement of fortune itself. A heart shape — the rounded, symmetrical kind anyone today would recognize instantly — was never part of that vocabulary. It's a modern sign, borrowed from nowhere near this tradition. And yet, open two of Studio Kim Kyungho's Blessing Series paintings side by side, and hearts are exactly what you find. Two Hearts, Two Very Different Jobs In Hyeongje-bok (형제복), the third work in the series, two arms curve outward across the top of the painting like a wide yoke — and every inch of that yoke is covered in red hearts. It isn't a light touch. The hearts sit on the part of the painting doing the heaviest lifting, literally: the crossbar that the whole chain of linked figures beneath it hangs from. Here, a heart isn't just affection. It's weight — the specific weight of something si...

Most of us, at some point, hit rock bottom. A plan falls apart, a door closes, a year goes nothing like we hoped. And at the bottom, people tend to split two ways. Some stay there. Others, slowly, get back up. Studio Kim Kyungho's fifth work in the Blessing Series is the story of the second path, painted from the floor up. The Bottom The painting literally begins at the bottom. In a rounded field set against gray, crumbling buildings sit two men. One has slumped over, eyes closed, as if he has stopped expecting anything. The other is still on the ground too, but his eyes are open and his jaw is set. Kim Kyungho describes this as the place where fear has sat us down. Look again, though, and you may see both choices that rock bottom offers. One man has settled into the floor. The other hasn't stood up yet, but he hasn't stopped looking. The Storm Getting up never happens in one motion. Above the two men, a ring of swirls in green, violet, pink and blue turns all at onc...

Ask most people to picture Korean traditional painting, and the image arrives instantly: a brush, ink settling into paper, maybe a hanji scroll unrolling across a low table. Centuries of screens and scrolls have trained us to expect that. Step into Studio Kim Kyungho's workspace while a new blessing is taking shape, though, and none of that is on the table. What's there instead is a sketchbook lying open flat, and a loose row of marker pens with their caps already off, in colors that have nothing to do with ink black or mineral blue. The markers are, specifically, Copic Classic Markers — the square-bodied, refillable kind serious illustrators buy by the dozen — paired with ShinHan Art Touch Twin Markers, a Korean brand built around two nibs on one pen: a broad, chisel-cut tip for laying down a field of color, and a fine one for the kind of line that has to behave itself. Both are alcohol-based. Both, in short, are tools you'd expect to find on a comic artist's or an a...

 Every blessing in the Blessing Series carries a signature — the particular curl of a brushstroke, the specific marker-ink red Studio Kim Kyungho reaches for when he wants warmth instead of urgency, the exact place where he decides an owl's eye should sit inside a swirl. None of that is accidental, and none of it is replaceable. It's why, when the question of protecting this work finally came up this year, it didn't feel like paperwork. It felt like an extension of the same instinct that goes into every painting: making sure what is given stays whole. That question arrived with ordinary, happy news. In August, Studio Kim Kyungho's first online gallery went live at kimkyunghoart.com — its front page opened, fittingly, with "Korean Mandala," the painting that first convinced its creator he shared something essential with the people who would one day stand in front of it. For the first time, anyone, anywhere, could scroll through decades of work — the Blessing Se...

Of course you don't. Nobody does. But Studio Kim Kyungho's fourth work in the Blessing Series paints that day anyway, in full, one piece at a time — almost as if someone wanted the memory to exist somewhere, even if it was never yours to keep. A Character Built From Sound and Life The hanja drawn into this piece is 産 (san), "to give birth," "to be born." Like many Chinese characters, it's a phono-semantic compound: 产 (a simplified form of 彦) lends its sound, while 生, "to live," anchors its meaning. Together, they form exactly what the word still means today — the moment life comes into being. The fuller wish people actually exchange is sunsan (順産): an easy, safe delivery. Read It the Way It Was Meant to Be Read This painting isn't meant to be read top to bottom. Start, instead, in the center. There, against a ground scattered with pink, red-hearted blossoms, a loose yellow shape curls — a baby, still inside the flower bed of its mother'...