Renowned illustrator Kim Jung Gi died Monday in Paris at age forty seven after struggling a coronary heart attack, the Daniel Maghen artwork gallery introduced Wednesday.
According to a assertion shared on Kim’s Instagram page, the South Korean artist had simply achieved his remaining engagement in Europe and was once about to board a aircraft to New York, the place he used to be scheduled to show up at Comic Con this week. After experiencing chest pains at the airport, Kim was once taken for surgical treatment to a close by hospital, the place he died.
“After having carried out so plenty for us, you can now put down your brushes,” wrote his collaborator, Hyun Jin Kim.
Kim was once regarded for his splendid capacity to draw complex illustrations completely from memory, with no references whatsoever, on massive canvases with his trusty brush pen. The gifted craftsman — who additionally contributed paintings to image novels, as properly as Marvel and DC comics — held the Guinness World Record for longest drawing by using an individual.
“His unexpected disappearance contrasts with the substantial happiness he added us,” study a declaration from the Maghen gallery in Paris, the place an exhibition of Kim’s work is on display.
“We are speechless. Daniel Maghen, the complete gallery team, and in particular Olivier Souillé, who had accompanied him for ten years, are terribly affected by way of his loss. All our ideas are became to his family, his spouse and his two children, his friends, his collaborators Kim Hyun Jin, Boin Lee, Jean-Christophe Caurette… and his fans, for whom his disappearance will go away a exceptional void.”
At the request of Kim’s family, his exhibition at the Maghen gallery will proceed in the artist’s reminiscence till Saturday.
Born in 1975 in the South Korean city of Goyang-si, Kim started out sketching at an early age before analyzing artwork and format at Dong-Eui University in Busan, in accordance to his artist bio. After attending college, Kim used to be required to serve two years in the South Korean army, the place he pretended to draw poorly to keep away from getting requested to graph snap shots of people’s cherished ones.
“They didn’t surely ask me too many favors,” Kim stated in a 2018 interview with Proko.
“I don’t even draw my very own family, so why need to I have to draw any one else’s? There was once every other artwork scholar that joined a few months after me who ended up shouldering a entire lot of this burden. And when he later determined out that I was once absolutely very properly at drawing, he bought a little annoyed.”
While serving in the army, Kim memorized the shape of a range of weapons and vehicles, such as navy aircraft, and started out to draw them in his mind.
“Of course, it was once a little scary, however my pursuits overrode any fear,” he advised Proko. “I would keenly take a look at the gears and the weapons and attempt to contact them and experience them if I could.”
Early in his creative career, Kim regularly drew erotic illustrations with picture depictions of intercourse and nudity, for which he was once once in a while criticized. Some had been so express that he ought to now not encompass them in his legit sketchbooks, which offered for greater than $100 apiece.
“I have been instructed that my drawings are misogynistic, and I’ve had humans ask me why I draw genitalia,” he advised Proko. “Well, I draw them due to the fact they’re there.
“I nevertheless have a lot of naughty ideas internal of me. I simply have greater humans round me that preserve me below control. ... They inform me give up drawing stuff like that. I used to draw anything I desired again when I wasn’t well-known ... But given that I now have a recognition to keep, I have limitations. That makes me a little sad.”
Over the years, Kim’s sprawling, resourceful drawings have depicted all types of things: people, lions, tigers, legendary creatures, superheroes, cityscapes, battles and beyond. In addition to promoting his graph collections, taking part with comedian e book publishers, educating on line artwork publications and showing his work at galleries and events, Kim additionally entertained the hundreds in actual time in the course of his stay drawing sessions.
While sketching complex pics earlier than an target market — every now and then over the path of numerous hours — the cartoonist would crack jokes and provide perception into his inventive process. Once his performances attracted a sizeable following, he held stay drawing periods in France, the United States and all over Asia.
On Wednesday, DC Comics Publisher Jim Lee hailed Kim by using Twitter as “one [of] the absolute greats,” whilst Marvel Comics editor C.B. Cebulski stated he was once “still sitting right here stunned” after gaining knowledge of of the artist’s death.
Kim “was a simply out of the ordinary Genius whose pen and brush wizardry captivated and stimulated hundreds of thousands of followers round the world,” Lee tweeted. “While he drew some gorgeous comics, it used to be his stay drawing & his sketchbooks about his life, travels and desires which spoke to me most. It used to be downright eerie and spellbinding to see any one with a close to photographic reminiscence deliver an illustration to lifestyles with the fashion and aptitude that solely Jung Gi ought to deliver.”
“There was once no one pretty like him,” Cebulski wrote. “Rest in peace.”
As of this year, Kim had posted six sketchbooks that quantity to about 4,500 pages really worth of drawings spanning greater than a decade. He additionally illustrated the Seung-Jin Park comic-book sequence “Tiger the Long Tail,” as properly as the Bernard Werber novels “The Paradise” and “Third Humanity.”
Drawing is “as herbal for me as breathing,” Kim informed Proko in 2018.
“I’m now not even wondering about what I’m drawing most of the time. If I can’t suppose of whatever to draw, I simply draw a character first and maintain including to it. ... I nevertheless locate drawing fun, and I hope that I won’t lose that feel of pleasure for a lengthy time.”