Jae Jin
Kim
Painter · Poet — Korea
Selected Works 2016–2026
“A good painting is a painting that carries a story.”
Jae Jin Kim is a poet, novelist, and essayist — the author of more than twenty books over four decades. Born in Korea in 1955, he graduated from a college of music and worked in his younger years as a producer at KBS, Korea's public broadcaster.
He had never studied painting. Then, in 2016, his mother — bedridden with Parkinson's disease — asked him to draw a mouth on the wall of her room. Shaken by the loneliness in that request, he bought colored pencils and pastels that same day. His first drawing was of baby birds, beaks open wide, waiting for the food their mother would bring. To bring her joy, he drew one picture every day; before long, those sketchbook pages became an exhibition he had never planned to hold, and more than forty works sold out. He has since held eleven exhibitions across Korea.
Critics have likened his paintings to a book with a story, or a poem. He paints and writes at his studio on the outskirts of Seoul.
“Kim Jae Jin, the poet who had raced headlong into the world of poetry, has returned to painting. That word — returned — suggests he may have been bound to painting from the very root: born, perhaps, a painter. His poetic imagination was, from the beginning, so entwined with images that his paintings become poems in themselves. His recent work shows, unmistakably, an extraordinary gift for laying snares with images.”
— Yoo Kyung-hee, Ph.D., Art Critic
Excerpted from her essay written for the artist’s solo exhibition leaflet