After graduated from the Departments of painting College of Fine Art of Hongik University, he designed the sets of drama, stage and more as a designer of TONGYANG BROADCASTING COMPANY. The stage design of "POPS TOP 10" was also his work. Although stage design was challenging job, he began to think that drawing a paint as a painter is the vocation. Three to four years later, he started to draw in earnest. The professor of his graduated university charged him to be an assistant and a lecturer at the university while he drawing. He became a professor of Gangeung National University (Gangeung-Wonju National University) at the youth as 33 years old.

Since he have to spend a lot of time for education, it was hard to spend a time for creativity, but Kim Hankook worked aggressively and had many personal exhibitions at Yoon Gallery, Soo Gallery, Hwasarang, Gallery Dong Soong Art Center, Gallery 2000 and more.
When the South Korean economy got worse in 1997 to 1998, he decided to be a exchange professor in Paris with his family. Living in Paris has become the big opportunity for him to acquire a new perspective. After coming and going the boundary between abstract expression and photographic expression, finally he could break his own wall of expression with the fusion of photo, computer and printing, that was the biggest change for him. At that time, he visited many countries in Europe and Southeast Asia, photographed the nature and the state of people and engraved them in his mind. Through these trips he began to own the macroscopic and implicit perspective as a painter. That's why the "PROJECTION - TRACE" series and the "FLOW FORMATION FLUID" series were born. Also these inspiration made the driving force for aggressive activities at the art fairs in Hong-Kong, Chicago, New York, Geneva and more after 2008. Especially, the exhibition of "Worm's Eye View Series" in Scope Basel was introduced in the English magazine "Identity" same as famous artists of whole world.

Destiny begins with a very small coincidence.
After Kim Hankook completed the exchange professor and return to South Korea, SARS was prevalent in worldwide. The thermographic cameras were working without a break in the most of public agencies. The airport was not an exception. Kim Hankook says he could not take his eyes off from the monitor which indicated the figure of the people in red shape. The figure of the red human being indicated through the lens was coming closer as a fresh form. From this time, he began to have his own perspective.The quest for the delicate human world, the essence of present situation, through his third eye has begun.

After using thermal images as a medium for painterly awakening, he has begun to face the destined coincidence once again. He got new inspiration from a small column in the newspaper. It says "Human civilization has developed from ancient times based on a bird's-eye view (eyes of bird look down the world) ". Therefore, precise parts are missing same as the different of the forest seen from a distance and the forest seen in the forest. However, we need more precise thought, worm's eye view (eyes of insects watch the world) in present."
"See the world from the worm's eye view"
Kim Hankook noticed that this is the new perspective that he have been thinking for a long time. Since then, he creates the "Worm's Eye View Series" in the motif of the thermographic camera and eyes of insects. Expressing the diversity and the deep entity of the world precisely with essentially and subjectivity not objectively through eyes of insects which have a so many eye lens as a painter. It would be unique word of him who is trying to purify the world.

Kim Hankook thinks that everyone can have his own third eye.
His work embodies the different facts which were dismissed from the common sense and missed from the modern civilization with the possibility of painting.

Yang Se-hyeong / Artmate Editor