LIM OKSANG is a Korean contemporary artist whose practice spans painting, paper relief, sculpture, installation and public art. His work explores the relationships between people, land and history, with a sustained attention to labour, memory and the conditions of everyday life.
A founding member of Reality and Utterance, Lim participated in the development of Korean realism and Minjung art in the 1980s. His early paintings brought metaphor, symbolism and narrative into dialogue with the social realities of their time.
From the 1990s onward, his practice expanded into three-dimensional forms and public spaces. Streets, squares and places of daily life became sites for artistic encounters, extending his work beyond the exhibition hall.
His longstanding engagement with land developed into works using soil itself as a material. Bringing together bodily labour, the rhythms of cultivation and the histories held within particular places, these works explore how art can remain connected to life. His 2022 solo exhibition at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, brought these concerns together.
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ARTISTIC PRACTICE
1970s–1980s | Realism and Experiments in Painting
Lim Oksang’s early paintings explored nature, human life and the historical realities of Korean society. Works such as Land I (1976), Bird (1977) and Fire (1979) brought natural forms into dialogue with symbolic imagery.
During the 1980s, he participated in Reality and Utterance, an artists’ collective that questioned the social role of art and its means of expression. His paintings combined recognisable subjects with altered proportions and the juxtaposition of contrasting images. Newspaper (1980), Coloured Paper (1981), Sewer (1982) and Barley Field II (1983) exemplify these experiments.
1985–1988 | A Modern History of Africa
In the mid-1980s, Lim extended his engagement with Korean society to the histories of the Third World. A Modern History of Africa, developed during his time in Angoulême, France, is a monumental painting series approximately 50 metres long and 1.5 metres high.
The work brings together images of nature, colonial domination, slavery, racial discrimination and struggles for liberation. Through African history, Lim sought to reflect on Korea’s historical experience and the wider conditions of human life.
Art critic Choi Tae-man drew attention to the work’s scale, its carefully structured historical narrative and the artist’s command of imagery. Presented at Gana Gallery in Seoul in 1988, the series marked an important expansion of Lim’s practice, connecting an engagement with Korean realities to questions of world history.
1995 | Raising the Land
For Rising Land, presented at Gana Gallery in 1995, Lim took impressions directly from the ground. Working in the fields of Neunggok, Goyang, close to encroaching development, he laid hanji, traditional Korean paper, over the dry earth to capture its surface.
The resulting reliefs retained the folds of the soil, the contours of furrows and the impressions of stones. Faces and hands emerged from these surfaces, connecting the land to those who had cultivated and inhabited it.
Literary critic Do Jung-il interpreted the work as an act of raising land that urbanisation had erased from view and restoring a voice to what had been silenced. These paper reliefs extended Lim’s longstanding concern with land into an exploration of material, memory and space.
2000s | Iron and Earth
In the 2000 exhibition Age of Iron, Sound of the Earth, Lim presented two monumental heads. One was constructed from metal debris collected at the Maehyang-ri military firing range; the other was formed from earth. Their encounter brought the violence of military materials into relation with the life-sustaining qualities of soil.
Art critic Park Shin-eui interpreted this relationship through the contrasting forces of violence and care. Lim continued to explore these concerns in Thinking Beyond the Iron Age (2002), transforming discarded bomb casings into sculptures and objects associated with everyday life.
Alongside these metal works, he continued making paper reliefs. In his statement for the 2005 Flower series exhibition at Galerie Hana in Kronberg, Germany, he expressed a desire to communicate with the earth through his hands, feet and whole body.
2010s | Renewing the Soil
During the 2010s, Lim’s work moved between public spaces, exhibition halls and soil-covered canvases. Mureung Mudeung (2015) returned to Mount Mudeung and the historical memory of Gwangju, while The Wind Rises (2017) brought the experience of the candlelight demonstrations into the exhibition space.
Critic Youn Bummo identified gaekto—the agricultural practice of adding fresh soil to replenish existing soil—as a key to understanding this work. Soil became both a material and a means of thinking about renewal.
In the 2019 exhibition Heurk in Hong Kong, Lim worked with ink and acrylic lines on soil-covered canvases. These paintings opened a further exploration of gesture, rhythm and the material presence of the ground.
2020s | Here, the Rising Land
In I Am a Tree (2021), Lim painted trees on canvases coated with soil, continuing his investigation of the relationship between image and material.
For his 2022 solo exhibition Lim Oksang: Here, the Rising Land at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, he took impressions of a rice field on the Jangdan Plain, within the Civilian Control Zone near the DMZ, and raised the earth into a wall 12 metres long.
The work brought the material presence of a restricted landscape into the museum. Critics approached it through questions of embodied perception, movement and the relationship between land and history.
Twenty-seven years after the paper reliefs of Rising Land, the ground stood again—this time in earth itself.