Tina Kim Gallery opens Recurrence, a solo exhibition of Kim Tschang-Yeul, on 5 November 2026, running to 19 December. It is the gallery's third solo presentation of the Korean artist, and it gathers his waterdrop paintings from the 1980s through the 2010s.

Kim (1929-2021) made the waterdrop his life's subject. Painted with near-photographic precision, his drops sit on raw canvas as if freshly fallen, catching light and casting faint shadows, at once an illusion and a meditation. Across decades he returned to the same motif, finding in a single drop of water a subject vast enough to carry questions of existence, impermanence and the nature of painting itself.

Kim began painting waterdrops in the 1970s, after moving from Seoul to Paris, and the motif stayed with him for the rest of his life. A drop of water, painted to look wet on dry canvas, is both the simplest of subjects and the hardest to sustain: it asks the viewer to look closely at something usually ignored, and to find in it a whole philosophy of attention. Over five decades he refined the image rather than abandoning it, letting small shifts in scale, light and surface carry the change.

The title Recurrence points to that discipline: the same image, painted again and again, never quite the same twice. The exhibition spans four decades of that practice, from the 1980s, when his visual language consolidated, to the 2010s, the final years of his working life.

For Tina Kim, the show continues a programme built around Korean modern and contemporary art, bringing a painter who spent much of his career in Paris back to a New York audience. Five years after his death, the waterdrops have lost none of their quiet pull.