Kim Hong Joo is best known for his painstaking renderings on large, unprimed canvases of such images as large flowers or leaf petals.
At first glance Kim's large paintings may seem like pretty pictures of flowers or leaves, but upon closer examination the viewer realizes that the image is not about the flower, but an exploration of the painting process, or of painting itself. The strokes are more important than the image itself, each movement of the brush marking a specific instance of time. In essence, Kim's work are a way of measuring his experience of time, of a life unhurried by modern demands.
In 1999, the Kukje Gallery presented his second exhibition which marked the culmination of his flower paintings and offered a review of Kim's art for the past decade. Throughout his career Kim has devoted himself to producing work in such manner that demonstrate his on-going concern with the discrepancy between the actual object and its painted image. By deconstructing an ordinary object and reproducing it as a painted image, Kim challenges us to take another look at something familiar.