Based on his colorful, lyrical, childlike landscapes of wildflowers, forests and Korea’s Mount Seorak, one might think South Korean artist Kim Chong Hak’s is far younger than his 88 years.

“When I first saw them, I thought it was by an artist maybe in their 30s,” said Michael Rooks, senior curator of modern and contemporary art for the High Museum and curator of “Kim Chong Hak, Painter of Seoraksan,” opening April 11.

Despite being an octogenarian, Kim’s sense of wonder remains firmly intact.

Works like his 2021 acrylic painting “Untitled (Landscape Series)” of a verdant forest filled with snowdrops, rhododendrons and star jasmine offer an almost Disney-esque level of visual enchantment. “Snowy Mountain,” (2008), in oil and paper on canvas, sets a craggy gray and white mountain against a psychedelic blue sky, enhancing nature’s eye-popping appeal. In Kim’s paintings, nature is approachable and intimate, far from the operatic landscapes of an Albert Bierstadt or Ansel Adams.

Credit: Courtesy of High Museum of Art / Kim Chong Hak

Credit: Courtesy of High Museum of Art / Kim Chong Hak

“For me the expressive quality of his work [makes him] a really genuine painter,” said Rooks. “He’s intuitive.”

Despite his age and long time on Korea’s art scene, Kim’s work is little known outside South Korea. The High show, which spans the artist’s career and includes 70 pieces, marks his first American museum exhibition. The show travels to the Phoenix Art Museum next.

Kim was born in 1937 in Shinuiju, Korea, during the Japanese occupation when Korean identity was defamed and degraded as “backward and unsophisticated,” said Rooks. Centuries of Korean culture were wiped out.

“This sense of inferiority was ingrained in them,” said Rooks.

The artist also lived through Russian control of North Korea after World War II; the partitioning of North and South Korea; the Korean War in 1950; the dictatorships of Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-hwan; and the blossoming of democracy in the 1980s.

In the 1950s, Kim’s art career intersected with Korean artists working in abstraction such as Park Seo-bo and Lee Ufan, whose work reflected similar movements in Europe and Japan, and who gained international fame.

But Kim received “a critical cold shoulder from art historians and curators,” who may have disregarded him for the sentimentality and prettiness of his paintings, Rooks noted in the exhibition catalog.

A trip to New York in the late 1970s was influential for Kim, said Rooks. He learned about neo-expressionism, met Anselm Kiefer and Julian Schnabel and decided to move into landscape and figurative painting in a more expressive style that Rooks calls radical for the time. But even with detours into other art movements, Korean history and folk traditions always remained at the fore of Kim’s work.

Credit: @parkdongseok

In addition to paintings and drawings on view at the High, the museum will display Kim’s extensive collection of Korean folk art and crafts including embroidered pincushions, pillows, traditional Bojagi (a decorative wrapping cloth) and marriage geese, a symbolic gift traditionally given to newlyweds in Korea.

Kim not only collects Korean arts and crafts, his art is deeply inspired by it.

The sweetness, sincerity and naive quality in Kim’s work is directly related to native craft traditions, said Rooks. While his nature paintings are based on the landscape of his home for the past 20 years in Mount Seorak National Park, much of Kim’s inspiration is rooted in the Korean traditions that generations of war, colonialism and oppression had previously erased.

“A lot of those images come out of folk embroidery, which is why they look childlike and they look naive, and almost like folk art. Because they’re based on these folk-art images. … He’s also honoring work that was traditionally assigned to women,” said Rooks.

Recovering Korean identity is central to Kim’s artistic work.

It is that search for national identity that drew Rooks to Kim’s work. The work feels particularly resonant in a city like Atlanta with its complicated history. Kim’s resurrection of Korean heritage is not dissimilar to the way African-American artists, filmmakers, novelists and intellectuals have worked to reclaim African and Black identity erased by slavery and the myriad repressions of segregation and systemic racism.

“It’s not just a show of one artist’s work,” Rooks said about Kim’s High exhibition, “but this artist represents his generation and the generational struggle to retrieve a certain national, unified identity.”

Kim is experiencing a resurgence of interest from younger generations of Koreans, including RM of the K-pop boy band BTS, who admire the artist’s role as a kind of cultural archivist celebrating Korea’s unique heritage.

Along with influential television shows and movies such as “Squid Game” and “Parasite,” and the popularity of K-beauty skin care products and K-pop music, “Kim Chong Hak, Painter of Seoraksan” fits right in with this country’s current Korean culture wave.

Credit: Courtesy of High Museum of Art / Kim Chong Hak

The exhibition is also an opportunity for the High Museum to embrace Atlanta’s Korean-American community. As the High’s director Rand Suffolk notes in the exhibition catalog, Korean Americans are the second largest and fastest growing immigrant community in the state. Kim’s show recognizes the value in making cultural connections in addition to business ones.

For Rooks, the show continues his interest as a curator in asserting Atlanta’s presence as an international city and engaging with that global identity and its immigrant populations.

“Since I’ve been affiliated with the High Museum my goals have aligned with the institution’s priorities and that is to reach many people … not just in Midtown and Atlanta.”

“It’s moving to me to see an artist dedicate his life to something that is so central to his life history, to his family, to his people, to the really traumatic history of his country and being marginalized for that,” said Rooks. “He’s willing to be belittled as a flower painter or a landscape painter, when in fact the work is so much deeper.”