Overview

KWUN SUN CHEOL (b. 1944, Changwon, Korea) is a Korean painter known for his expressive paintings of human faces, landscapes, and the traces of time and memory. He studied Painting at Seoul National University, where he received both his BFA and MFA.

In 1989, he moved to Paris, France, establishing an artistic practice between Korea and France. His work explores the human condition and Korean history through powerful faces and landscapes, characterized by thick matière, vivid color, and expressive brushwork. His paintings exist at the intersection of figuration and abstraction.

KWUN SUN CHEOL has exhibited extensively in Korea and internationally, including in Paris, Berlin, Frankfurt, Düsseldorf, Stockholm, New York, and Troyes. He was awarded the 4th Lee Jung Seop Art Award in 1992. (Gana Atelier)

Selected Solo Exhibitions

• 2026 — Soul (L’âme), SPACE 97, Seoul, Korea; Gaze, Beyond the Figure, Kim Chong Yung Museum, Seoul, Korea
• 2025 — The Enduring Winds and Frost (萬古風霜), Art Center K, Daejeon, Korea
• 2024 — Neok (Soul), Shah Gallery, Changwon, Korea
• 2021 — CHEOL, Changseong-dong Laboratory, Seoul, Korea
• 2020 — Trace, Gana Art Center, Seoul, Korea
• 2019 — Faces, Son Gallery, Berlin, Germany
• 2016 — KWUN SUN CHEOL — Gaze, Daegu Art Museum, Daegu, Korea; The Light of the Soul — Jesus, Gana Art Center, Seoul, Korea
• 2012 — Gana Art Center, Seoul, Korea; Ara Art Center, Seoul, Korea; Son Gallery, Berlin, Germany
• 2010 — Gana Art New York, New York, USA
• 2007 — Gana Art Busan, Busan, Korea
• 2004 — Gana Art Center, Seoul, Korea
• 2003 — Doosan Gallery, Daegu, Korea; Musée d’Art Moderne, Troyes, France
• 2001 — Gana-Beaubourg Gallery, Paris, France; Hongik Gallery, New York, USA
• 2000 — Gana-Beaubourg Gallery, Paris, France
• 1998 — Gana Gallery, Seoul, Korea
• 1997 — Gana-Beaubourg Gallery, Paris, France
• 1993 — 4th Lee Jung Seop Art Award Exhibition, Chosun Ilbo Gallery, Seoul, Korea
• 1992 — Frank Hanel Gallery, Frankfurt, Germany
• 1991 — Gana Gallery, Seoul, Korea; Galerie Batteau-Lavoir, Paris, France
• 1990 — FORUM, Düsseldorf, Germany
• 1988 — Stockholm International Painting Exhibition, Stockholm, Sweden; Gana Gallery, Seoul, Korea
• 1986 — Seoul Art Exhibition, Seoul, Korea

Award

• 1992 — 4th Lee Jung Seop Art Award

Education

• 1984 — MFA, Department of Painting, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea
• 1971 — BFA, Department of Painting, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea

Artist’s Statement

KWUN SUN CHEOL (b. 1944, Changwon, Korea) explores the human condition through the face, the landscape, and the material presence of paint. His work is grounded in the belief that painting can hold what cannot be fully expressed in words: memory, suffering, endurance, and the passage of time.

The human face is central to his practice. Rather than presenting individual portraits, he treats the face as a site where personal experience and collective history converge. Marked by age, hardship, and resilience, his figures evoke lives shaped by Korea’s turbulent modern history. Their expressions remain open and ambiguous, inviting the viewer to encounter not a single story, but the accumulated weight of human experience.

His landscapes are likewise more than representations of place. They are spaces of memory, charged with atmosphere and emotional resonance. Through them, he reflects on displacement, loss, belonging, and the traces left by lived experience. The landscape becomes both physical terrain and an inner, psychological space.

His paintings are built through dense matière, vivid color, and expressive brushwork. The surface carries the force of the artist’s gesture, allowing the materiality of paint to become inseparable from the emotional intensity of the image. Moving between figuration and abstraction, his work does not seek to reproduce appearances, but to reveal the deeper sensations and memories embedded within them.

Having developed his practice between Korea and France since moving to Paris in 1989, KWUN SUN CHEOL has created a distinctive visual language rooted in the immediacy of painting and a sustained reflection on human existence.

Biography

KWUN SUN CHEOL (b. 1944, Changwon, Korea) is a Korean painter whose career has unfolded across Korea and France since the late 1980s. He studied Painting at Seoul National University, earning both his Bachelor of Fine Arts and Master of Fine Arts degrees.

In 1989, he moved to Paris, where he established a long-term base for his artistic activities. This transition marked an important shift in his career, connecting his Korean background with a broader European context and enabling him to develop an independent position within contemporary painting.

KWUN SUN CHEOL has worked across portraiture, landscape, and abstraction, building a body of paintings distinguished by a strong physical engagement with the medium. His works are recognized for their dense surfaces, intense colors, and vigorous brushwork, through which he gives each image a distinct material and visual presence.

Since the 1980s, he has presented his work in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Korea and abroad. His international exhibition history includes presentations in Paris, Berlin, Frankfurt, Düsseldorf, Stockholm, New York, and Troyes. In 1992, he received the 4th Lee Jung Seop Art Award.

He continues to live and work between Korea and France, maintaining a sustained commitment to painting and to the possibilities of the medium.

Works