Despite his mentor’s suspicions, Kim was no more interested in making realist protest art (later dubbed Minjung misul or “people’s art”) than he was in doggedly pursuing a pseudo-Korean form of modernism like the Dansaekhwa (“monochrome”) artists. Kim was invited to join the Minjung art movement in 1985 after the police forcefully removed artworks and arrested five people at their exhibition “Power of the Younger Generation.” Kim declined to join their ranks officially, because, as Hahm explained, “He believed that the institutionalized Modernism should embrace Minjung art, which was the Korean avant-garde, while also contending that Minjung art should not be consumed by its purpose and discard the aesthetic potential of avant-garde art.” Instead, in his own works, Kim navigated between these two harshly oppositional factions by defying each of their sacred positions. At Ilmin, this is evident in Kim’s cut-paper works from the early 1980s on the first floor, where he used cardboard, pencil and ink to make very angular, geometrical abstractions in what at first seem like constructivist-style pieces (some reminiscent of Nasreen Mohamedi drawings). Up close these modest works are revealed to be little trompe l’oeil gags about modernist forms, as Kim pushes the cut-out forms outside the edges of the rectangle, or flips them over to reveal expressionistic drawings on the backside of the paper, or confuses the eye by mixing cut-out shapes with pencil-drawn lines. A pair of untitled, red and white works from 1990 presage his works of the ensuing decade, with circular cut-outs, plant-juice stains and diaristic scribbles across the surface. Rather than oppositional, Kim’s works remained self-critical over the years.

By 1987, Kim had formulated his own criteria of “anti-standards” for a good artwork. As little energy (labor), cost and skill as possible should be used in making it, and the final work should be easily reproducible, transportable and susceptible to damage. Of course, he also then violated many of his own rules in the 1989 sculpture Two-pieces, which is a deliberate mess of un-conventionalism (anti-anti-art): two standing red MDF panels, each 2.4-meters in height, are bolted to each other; their barely visible inner-facing sides are covered in messy, “abstract” paintings. There are randomly cut circles across the panels, a jagged side on one of them and an additional cut portion on the other that hinges outward like a foot. This flap contains a poster of the work’s original showing in an exhibition at Inkong Gallery, in the spring of 1989. Two-pieces is a completely undisciplined postmodern object: neither social-realist nor purely modernist, nor even “good” by Kim’s own standards.

But Kim didn’t stop at burning his idols. Since the dawn of the current decade, he has also begun to kill off his own oeuvre. The third floor at Ilmin Museum features both archival materials (books, catalogues, slides, photographs and a timeline) and the artist’s latest series of “Coffin” works. As a preamble to this accumulation of materials, in a nook at the gallery entrance, was a pile of folded plastic wrapping and cardboard boxes, along with two of his cut-paper works laying on top. Although Kim has been interested in the packaging of his works since 1981, in the 2010s his fascination turned from art-packaging to funereal rituals. In Ksitigarbha 2 (2015), for instance, a painting is packaged in blue bubble-wrap and laid inside a wooden crate with a transparent window on which Kim has drawn the outline of the robed Ksitigarbha Bodhisattva and his sutra. Nearby, To Ilmin Museum of Art 2016 (2016) is a hanging bamboo stick and a brown-paper package bound in rope, apparently containing a folded-up “Plane Object” canvas, adorned with older images of the work and invitations for the exhibitions where it was previously displayed. The artist’s musings are everywhere in these works, most definitely in Triptych (2015), a crate hanging on the wall that contains two university-era paintings (a landscape and a self-portrait), other fragments of past works (including a polka-dot canvas) and a copper pot containing the ashes of incense. The crate has a transparent acetate side that features (from left to right) a drawing of the Fall of Adam and Eve, an unhappy looking Buddha, and a depiction of souls being tortured in Hell. On the surface Kim wrote his latest screed, which begins, “The modernist scheme that attempted to pursue freedom, equality and peace for all mankind has broken down,” and concludes, “The collection and re-arrangement of torn, broken, dirty and moldy artworks that are stained with suffering and corruption, death and abjectness, is bestowed to the artist who will usher in the forthcoming dystopian era [ . . . ] In my imagination, it is the art of a dystopian era that signals acquired creation where yang is transformed into yim [sic] and art it is political art in the form of low-entropic eco-anarchism.”

The death of Kim’s own work was in fact prefigured from the very year of its birth. The catalogue for “Closer . . . Come Closer . . .” includes a newspaper clipping that reports that on February 22, 1975, a student had apparently died during a graduation ceremony at Hongik University, transforming the scene into an impromptu funeral. The whole event was later revealed to be a happening by the fierce women’s experimental filmmaking club, Khai Du. The person who “died” that celebratory day and was carried out of graduation in a wooden coffin was Kim Yong-ik. The cycle of life and death (or killing and resurrection), which the Ilmin Museum’s exhibition described, revealed how Kim productively evaded Korea’s polarization while still advocating for avant-garde experimentation and social progressiveness. “Closer . . . Come Closer . . .” made clear how the iconoclastic figure has become an inspiration to several younger generations now: admired for his ability to be political without being partisan, and always brutally honest with himself and his audience.

Kim Yong-Ik’s “Closer . . . Come Closer . . .” is on view at the Ilmin Museum of Art, Seoul, until November 6, 2016.

HG Masters is editor at large of ArtAsiaPacific.