[1]: 58 In his early work, Kim quickly departed from the conventions of painting by incorporating industrial materials and performing destructive acts such as burning his artwork.
[5]: 110 In the midst of his first year, he dropped out because the school's reinforcement of an academic canon, centered upon French modern masters such as Matisse and Cézanne, disinterested him.
[6]: 277 Instead, Kim wanted to study more contemporaneous artists; he turned to the pages of Life and Time magazines (brought to the Korean peninsula by the U.S. military), where he first learned about Jackson Pollack and Pierre Soulages.
[6]: 276–277 Nonetheless, feeling rejected by Daegu's art scene of university-graduated artists, in 1968 Kim moved to Seoul (where he also began a position as a planning director for YOUYOUNG Industries).
[2]: 47–48 [6]: 98 After mounting events in public that proved incendiary, The Fourth Group disbanded following intensive interrogation from the government and Kim Kulim's own arrest and detention.
From early abstract paintings marked with figurative gestures, Kim Kulim began to explore highly unconventional, experimental methods and materials for art making beginning in the mid-1960s.
[6]: 96 After Kim Kulim moved to Seoul in 1968, his experimentation expanded dramatically as he pursued new dimensions of art practice, notably by dabbling in film and performing happenings.
As the head of public relations efforts for YOUYOUNG industries, Kim Kulim gained access to film equipment used for making promotional content.
[6]: 103 The film provides a fly-on-the-wall perspective upon the life of a young women who, like many others in her generation, moved to Seoul to find factory work, but ultimately fell into prostitution because they were unable to obtain other employment opportunities.
The film shows a flitting montage of scenes from around Seoul, from the railing of an elevated expressway to street crowds, from blooming cigarette smoke to high-rise buildings in construction.
[6]: 118 Reminiscent of daily life in the quickly-urbanizing city, the film documented South Korea's new modernity with a touch of cynicism,[6]: 121 underscored by interstitial clips of Chung's slow yawn.
[4]: 12 [6]: 184 The next year, Kim mounted a series of happening-like projects under the title From Phenomenon to Traces (1970), each of which aimed to express time in physical, material ways and resulted in friction with institutional conventions.
[5]: 110 Born from this transition, his Yin and Yang series (begun in the late 1980s) has emphasized dualities—drawing upon the twin concepts of Eastern thought in its title—often through painting, printmaking, and/or collage.
[1]: 17 When describing this series, Oh Kwang-su observed repeated subjects of ordinary objects, rendered incompletely with forms that oscillate between unfinished and effaced, in ways that foreground the artistic process instead of aiming to capture reality.