Hanyoung Kim graduated from the Department of Painting at Hongik University's College of Fine Arts in 1984 and received his M.F.A. from the same institution's Graduate School in 1987. Over the four decades since, he has remained a steady presence within the currents of Korean contemporary art. His practice can be broadly divided into two periods: an early phase of woodcut prints and installation that extended from the 1980s through the mid-2000s, and a later phase of oil painting that began in earnest with the Signs of Nature series in 2017.
Kim's career took shape in the early 1980s through participation in major exhibitions at home and abroad, including the 10th Independents Exhibition at the National Museum of Modern Art in Seoul, the 23rd Joan Miró International Drawing Prize Exhibition at the Miró Gallery in Barcelona, the Joan Miró International Drawing Japan Tour (Tokyo and Okinawa), and the 10th and 11th Kanagawa International Independents Exhibitions in Japan. During the same period, his involvement with the woodcut collective Na-Moo, Group 1/12, and the Hongik Print Making Group placed him among the artists who helped shape one strand of contemporary Korean printmaking.
These early activities culminated in his first solo exhibition, Forest (installation), at Gallery Doll, Seoul, in 1989. The two solo exhibitions that followed — Woods at Gallery Yale (1995) and Wild Flowers at Insa Art Center (2006) — established a sustained inquiry into nature articulated through the languages of woodcut and installation.
From 2017 onward, Kim's practice entered a new phase as he turned to canvas and oil paint. That year, his fourth and fifth solo exhibitions at Sejong Hotel Gallery and Hoon Gallery introduced his painting series The Signs of Nature. He has since pursued the same theme with unwavering focus across his sixth solo exhibition at Hoon Gallery (2020), seventh at Gallery Doo (2021), and eighth and ninth at Hoon Gallery (2022). The Signs of Nature renders the organic forms observed in nature through countless points and layers of color: from a distance the surface reads as a quiet gradation of hue, but as the viewer draws closer, it transforms into a tactile, dimensional field — a pictorial language entirely his own.
Since this turn to painting, Kim has remained actively engaged on both domestic and international stages. In Korea, he has consistently taken part in major art fairs such as KIAF (2017, 2018), BAMA Busan International Art Fair, the Korea Galleries Art Fair, Daejeon International Art Show, AHAF, and the Blue, Pink, and Bank Art Fairs. Abroad, he has been invited to Focus London Art Fair at the Saatchi Gallery and Fitzrovia Gallery in 2021, Focus Art Fair in Paris (Artsper) the same year, Focus Art Fair London at the Saatchi Gallery in 2024, and Focus Art Fair New York at Chelsea Industrial in 2025 — extending the reach of his work into international circuits.
Most recently, his work is featured in We, Such Fragile Beings (우리 이토록 작은 존재들), a curated exhibition at the PODO Museum in Jeju running from August 2025 through August 2026, where the artist's enduring meditation on nature and life is once again offered to the public.