A new vision of Christ is coming from a Korean artist who says God taught him how to paint.
Traditional images of Jesus Christ tend to come off on the somber side. There’s Jesus on the cross, the shepherd carrying a broken sheep on his shoulders, and the footprints-in-the-sand image, conjuring up a benevolent picture—and yet, still a faceless one.
On the flipside, contemporary art leaps in a different direction when reimagining Christ—it gets creative, political, and sometimes outright heretical. But Yongsung Kim is trying for a different approach. The Korean artist is taking on the steep challenge of changing how the world pictures Jesus.
Kim became a Christian in middle school and a cartoonist as a young adult. When he was 20, he had a dream in which God asked him, “What are you doing with the gifts I’ve given you?” From there he felt compelled to paint an image of Christ he hadn’t seen very often. He told the Creators Project, “So many depictions of Christ are already dark and somber. I want my paintings to share some of the light and hope that Jesus offers.
His paintings show Jesus reveling in light, or offering it (sometimes directly to the viewer). Even the shouldered-sheep image, reimagined by Kim, feels less disheartening and a little lighter, suggesting that there’s something redemptive running parallel to that traditional image of pain.
Kim has no formal art training but says it was God who taught him how to paint.
See the beautiful paintings below!
(Courtesy of Foundation Arts)
