Sang Woo Kim

As I cross the threshold of the cafe, he jumps up to embrace me; he has been waiting on a low stool in the shade just inside. I swiftly order a takeaway coffee. “Maybe let’s walk,” says Sang.

Together, we stroll through the tree-lined streets of Clapton – him, leading the way, me, lightly following. We decide to head to his home. He needs to collect some redirected post for his mum, who recently moved back to Seoul after 31 years in south-west London, where Sang grew up.

At this time of year, London opens up after the long grey months. Sang is at an energetic point in his life, and things are beginning to fall into place. He’s heading to Art Basel at the end of the week, where his new gallery, Herald St, will show his latest paintings. His recent exhibition across the gallery’s Bethnal Green and Bloomsbury spaces was a successful introduction to his work for the London art world. There is undoubtedly a bounce in his step. Splashes of hot coffee escape through the sipping hole of my cup, settling around the plastic moulding of the lid.

We turn into the porch of a red-brick mansion block, converted into several roomy flats. The hallway is unusually beautiful: square checkerboard floor tiles and chunky, carved wooden balustrades. “I’ve spent a lot of time working on this apartment,” he says as we climb higher.

On the top floor is Sang’s home, which he shares with his girlfriend and another housemate. The night before, he had hosted her parents here for the first time – something he admits he was nervous about, though I have no doubt he nailed it. He’s easy to get along with.

It’s the space of someone with visual acuity and a desire for sanctuary, or at least an organised external world. In the living room, a three-piece set and a leather pavilion sofa surround a low coffee table with lacquered, rearrangeable compartments.

Sang’s family moved from Seoul to London in 1994, when he was just six months old. “Korean culture can be both patriarchal and traditional,” he says, explaining how, typically, the father earns the income while the mother raises the children. This sense of traditionalism inflected his own upbringing.

After he’d finished secondary school, his parents had hoped he’d pursue architecture. But Sang had other ideas. He was quietly defiant, confident in his ability to paint – a passion he’d been nurturing since he was ten. “I knew it’s what I wanted to do,” he says, simply.

So, initially, without his parents’ knowledge, he started compiling a portfolio to apply for foundation courses – a year-long programme that offers students a grounding in a range of media, from sculpture to printmaking. He secured a place to study for the Foundation Diploma in Art and Design at the Black Hill campus of Central Saint Martins. “I met queer people and others from different backgrounds there,” he remembers fondly.

While at Saint Martins, Sang occasionally modelled ad hoc for his classmates’ fashion projects. This is par for the course in art and fashion schools, but even in that context, Sang stood out: slender and tall, with distinct, striking features. At 19, outside the university, he caught the attention of a prominent casting director who invited him to take modelling more seriously. “I was walking for Kenzo in Paris soon after,” he says. It was the moment things began to shift.

“There was a sense that people are seeing me through a particular lens,” he says of that time. “I knew it was a Western gaze directed at someone who looks Korean.” Cultural and aesthetic perspectives can shape perception and opportunity. “If I were based in Seoul,” he adds, “I probably wouldn’t be scouted in the same way.”

His fashion career advanced in parallel with his education, as he transitioned from Saint Martins to Goldsmiths – another of London’s prestigious art schools – where he studied on the BA course in Fine Art for a year and a half before eventually deciding to leave.

“It all came down to one moment,” he tells me, recalling a tutorial with celebrated British artist Ed Atkins, whose class Sang was in during his second year. “My modelling profile was growing, and Ed noticed I wasn’t in the studio much.” Atkins advised him that sustaining an artistic practice requires financial stability and encouraged him to defer his studies to focus on modelling —essentially, to strike while the iron is hot.

So, Sang left Goldsmiths for an international life on the runway and in front of the lens, which he says made him feel like a “FedEx parcel” – gallivanting across the world to take part in the Fashion Week circuit: Milan, New York, Paris, and so on. The image of a guy in his late teens as a cardboard box is enough to tell me it was lonely – and probably exhausting. But his hard work and travel paid off: Sang rose to the status of a highly sought-after model. He built a career coveted by countless aspiring hopefuls, striding down runways and appearing in editorials for the likes of Burberry, Dries Van Noten and Fendi. In 2014, he was even named models.com’s Reader’s Choice Breakout Star Male Model of the Year.

Nowadays, fashion increasingly steps into the realm of contemporary art, and vice versa. Former designers like Martin Margiela and Helmut Lang produce sculptures intended for the gallery, while Gr Wales Bonner and Martine Rose stage exhibitions at spaces like Sadie Coles HQ and Serpentine. Jonathan Anderson has regularly dipped into the art­historical canon to enrich his collections at Loewe and now Dior. But when Sang started out as a model, this kind of crossover was rarer.

If, like Sang, you build a public image doing one thing (modelling), the gatekeepers of another field (art) – often upholding class boundaries, whether consciously or not —expect you to justify your presence there. But we live in a multifaceted, expensive world, where people do, and are, many things. The art world, as I see it, should move with the artist – and the artist should ask things of it.

Here, the assumption might be to think of Sang as a former international model – his face splashed across magazine pages and on giant billboards – turned painter, but that would be inaccurate: he was a painter first. That internal clarity helped propel him. When I ask him what he enjoyed most about modelling, he is quick to respond. “It funded my freedom – I knew it would allow me to keep making art.”

His work as a painter caught the attention of Sébastien Bertrand, a gallerist in Geneva. After participating in several group exhibitions, he was taken on by Herald St in London. With locations in both Bethnal Green and Bloomsbury, Herald St occupies a rare space in the gallery landscape – cool without being too niche or emerging, and established without feeling dated. Representation by the gallery marks a significant milestone and a meaningful endorsement in a young artist’s career. It is genuinely impressive that Sang has maintained the tenacity required to succeed not only in one hyper-competitive career, but two. For artists, sustaining a practice – financially and creatively – while not losing spirit or conviction is extremely challenging and often underestimated. I ask if his parents see his success as a barometer for their own – and whether he felt that pressure to succeed. He says he did. But by now, he’s surely long disproved any early doubts.

Up a flight of stairs and past a small kitchen, the room is predictably neat. On an orange table shaped like a four-leaf clover sits a pile of books – one on French post-Impressionist Édouard Vuillard, topped by a pocket-sized volume on Italian Renaissance master Sandro Botticelli. On the easel stands an unfinished self-portrait, his face turned away, gaze averted. Two pigment-transfer works, each composed of multiple stacked canvases, hang on the walls, along with a single framed painting on the opposite side of the room. I nestle on the edge of a grey sofa, knowing I’ll need to stand up and get my nose closer to the small canvases to take in their lustrous surfaces, while Sang positions himself on his painting stool in front of me.

A typical self-portrait by Sang is tightly cropped, often isolating fragments of his face. He snaps photos on his phone, then selects the ones to use as a reference for his paintings. Clipped to the easel on a bendy arm is an iPad, where he loads these images as he works. His gaze often drifts out of the frame, his head turned away from the viewer. Take, for example, ‘You’re looking at me’ (2023) – a direct title that implicates the viewer. The image is cropped to his face, his eyes locking with ours, as if to say: but I’m looking back at you. There’s an almost forensic self-­examination at play.

I’m reminded of Jean-Paul Sartre’s concept of “The Look,” where being seen by another turns you from a free subject into an object in their eyes. It’s a shift that can spark self-consciousness, shame, pride – all tangled emotions born from that gaze. Sang’s work touches on a double bind: a painting is meant to be looked at, yet its subject both invites the gaze and pushes it away.

Sang lights up when he talks about Robert Rauschenberg, the American artist known for his ‘Combines’ (1954–1964) that blur the lines between painting and sculpture. “Looking at his work influences the pigment-transfer pieces,” he says. Rauschenberg was ridiculously prolific, and at the height of his output, he produced vast canvases that layer reprinted images – pulled through various techniques – of wildly different scenes. I can see how Rauschenberg’s almost cavalier way of reworking and reframing imagery seeps into Sang’s pigment-transfer works, which stitch together fragments from multiple sources.

I’m surprised when he references American conceptual artist Matthew Barney, whose performances and films feel worlds apart from these paintings. Yet, like Sang, Barney was a model during his art studies at Yale. To me, Barney offers Sang a kind of career map – proof that it’s possible to break free from the expectation of excelling in just one field. Barney was also an athlete – an experience that continues to influence his practice, most notably in his 2024 exhibition ‘SECONDARY’ at the Fondation Cartier, Paris, which riffed heavily on American football.

The question of the gaze surfaces again in Sang’s pigment-transfer images – works created through a process he keeps intentionally vague. “It’s an inkjet technique,” he says with a grin. Yet the results feel magical: images pulled from a digital archive that softly bleed at the edges, like bright Helen Frankenthaler stain paintings. His knack for composition – the same instinct that arranges the precise furniture in his flat – shines through unmistakably: fraught faces, cloudy eyes, historic statues and empty pupils all buttress one another in these works.

In one of the pigment-transfer works in the studio, a pair of psychedelic eyes crowns a totem of rectangular canvases that, each in its own way, reference the act of looking. My mind drifts to the famous scene in Luis Buñuel’s surrealist film ‘Un Chien Andalou’ (1929), where a heavy hand opens a woman’s eyelids and slices her eyeball. That cut is often read as a symbol of analogue film editing.

There’s something distinctly cinematic about Sang’s work – like frames pulled from a series of films. They call to mind paintings by his contemporaries, including Issy Wood, who also plays with her own self-image, and Joseph Yaeger, who isolates and renders dramatic, filmic crops. They all share a preoccupation with fragmentation and theatrical intensity.

But does he still model? Yes – but on his own terms now: “If someone wants to work with me, I usually want to choose the photographer myself.” He has the freedom to move with intention, finally heading in the direction he was always intending to go.

He gestures toward the canvas hanging on the wall beside us – a self-portrait in his signature dappled oil paint, his eyes peeking out from beneath a children’s superhero mask, the kind that covers only the eye sockets. “It’s called ‘Character Study’ – but it’s Robin, not Batman,” he says of the mask.

I think back on everything he’s shared about his upbringing, and how this childlike, performative image both meets the viewer’s gaze and shields an identity. The tension between being seen and staying hidden feels prescient. When, like Sang, you haven’t always had agency over your image – as he describes in his modelling years – the instinct to protect it, to protect yourself, comes naturally. His paintings often touch on a power dynamic, with the artist attempting to reclaim his agency. But his repeated focus on fragments of the face reveals a paradoxical undercurrent of both self-scrutiny and playfulness.

So, is the superhero mask a defence? No, it doesn’t seem so. The work’s full title is ‘Character Study 002 (‘Kid’ by Simon Armitage)’. The poem it references, by Armitage, a British poet, details how Robin has stepped out of Batman’s shadow to surpass him and, as the final lines attest, become “the real boy wonder.” The mask is one of empowerment.

It’s hard to imagine anything standing in Sang’s way. I sense that he wants to keep an eye on how much his life as a model shapes the lens through which people view his artwork. But his work is delicate, compelling and beautiful, and the deft way he navigates his self-image and personal history only enhances and deepens it.

That afternoon, I leave him in his studio, where he is painting again.