At 91, sculptor “One with wood”
A muscular chunk of wood. A whirring chainsaw. A 91-year-old woman at the helm. It’s not exactly the combination you expect to see every day. In Kim Yun-shin’s hands, the chainsaw was less a tool of destruction than of revelation. At an age when most hands have long grown still, hers were still carving life out of wood. That relentless drive is what has carried her through a seven-decade career, yielding more than a staggering 1,500 sculptures and paintings along the way. “That’s enough to stage at least three or four more retrospectives,” museum curator Tae Hyun-sun said with a smile. To give the works the room they deserve, the museum stripped away all partition walls on the ground floor, opening the galleries into one sweeping space. The decision pays off. Against the airy expanse, Kim’s wooden assemblies, twisting and rising, feel like living things sprouting from the gallery floor. “I am the tree, and the tree is me. I’m simply nature,” said the artist, her thick white hair cropped short and a black overcoat draped over her shoulders, without a moment’s hesitation,
One of her earliest memories is of witnessing rows upon rows of pine trees fallen across the mountainsides near her village. “I used to play with the stars, talk to the raindrops and chat with the grass, the flowers and the trees. Those trees were my friends. Why on earth were they lying there upside down?” she recalled. “As their friend, I wanted to raise those trees back up,” she said. “I wanted to work with them so people would keep them, preserve them.” As her confidence with wood deepened, Kim began pushing her practice further. She spent time in quarries in Mexico and Brazil, turning her attention to stone — onyx and sodalite — and coaxing luminous forms from materials just as demanding as the hardwoods. These sculptures now occupy the museum’s second floor. “Stone is difficult in its own way, just as wood is,” she said. “It’s not something just anyone can do. Without the conviction that I had to pursue this path, I wouldn’t have come this far.”
That faith in material lies at the heart of her philosophy: “Add Two Add One, Divide Two Divide One.” The idea is simple yet profound. When artist and material meet, they first become one. From that union, something new emerges, separating into its own form. “In the end, everything becomes one,” she said. “My art becomes me.” In 2026, Kim now moves with the help of a cane and a wheelchair. And yet that thought still holds true. Place a chainsaw in her hands and something shifts. The years seem to fall away; the body remembers the rhythm of the blade biting into wood. “I don’t have any grand dream,” she said. “Now that I have returned to my own country, I simply hope the work I leave behind will be worthy.”
Cutting Chainsaw humor
A lumberjack once told me he’s cut down 27,572 trees.
“How do you know exactly how many?” I inquired.
“Easy. I keep a log.”
What is the fear of chainsaws called?
Common sense.
Did you know Bill Burr has a brother that is a lumberjack?
His name is Tim.
What does a Chinese lumberjack do?
Chop sticks.
The employees at Lowe’s will ignore you for a full 25 minutes…
until you start a chainsaw.
April 22nd Birthdays
1966 – Amber Heard, 1967 – Sherry Shepherd, 1985 – Lauri Hendler, 1976 – Resse Witherspoon
1931 – William Shatner, 1972 – Willie Robertson, 1937 – Jack Nicholson, 1936 Glen Campbell