The Korean Cultural Center New York is presenting Tchah Sup Kim: The Key to a New World, a retrospective of the Korean artist Tchah Sup Kim (1940–2022), in its Gallery and Atrium through October 24, 2026, the center said. The exhibition is his first posthumous retrospective.
It gathers more than 130 works and archival materials made over nearly five decades, tracing Kim's path between New York and Korea, from printmaking experiments in the 1970s to later pieces about civilization, history, nature and the cosmos. His work is held by The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum, and was included in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum's 2023 exhibition Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s–1970s.
Kim moved to New York in 1974 with support from the John D. Rockefeller 3rd Fund Fellowship and studied printmaking at Pratt Institute, where he worked in etching. Among the works on view is Triangle Between Infinities (1976), on loan from The Museum of Modern Art, which introduced the triangle as a motif he returned to; by opening one vertex, the closed geometric form came to suggest openness, circulation and connection. The center's curator and program director of visual arts, Hee Sung Cho, said New York was not merely where Kim lived and worked but where his visual language and way of thinking expanded.
A centerpiece of the show is the Coffee Cup Series, made between 1984 and 1989 and shown in its entirety, all 85 works. It began with the flattened shape of the paper coffee cup associated with New York diners, which Kim turned into a surface for images, symbols, figures and language, using an everyday American object to reflect on migration and identity.
The exhibition also recreates part of the SoHo studio where Kim lived and worked with his wife, the artist Myong-Hi Kim, from 1982. An unfinished painting and an easel are displayed with globes, rulers, books, stones, a baseball and natural materials from his working environment. After returning to Korea in the 1990s, his interests moved toward civilization, history, geography, astronomy and human existence. The title comes from a phrase in one of Kim's notes; for him, a new world meant the possibility of seeing beyond existing frameworks.