Artist Portfolio - Kim Jung Gi

The South Korean tells Gary Evans how he went from being a college dropout to becoming a world-famous artist.

- Gary Evans

Kim Jung Gi steps up to a blank canvas. It’s huge – several metres wide. Pen in hand, he makes his first mark, drawing a mechanic working on a rally car. Another man rides a camel out into the desert. Dogs follow.

The story picks up the pace now. A shepherd appears, and he’s carrying an AK-47. Perspectives plunge, narratives arc, plots and subplots intertwine. Gi adds motorbikes, trucks, more cars. Finally, in the middle of it all, the artist illustrates himself: he wears his trademark glasses and hoodie, he sits quietly at a desk, and he draws.

In just a few hours, the Korean has covered the whole canvas, right up to the very edge. He’s used no references, no thumbnails, or rough sketches. He drew it all from memory. It looked like he could’ve kept drawing indefinitely.

“I have the ability,” Gi says, “to draw straight to paper whatever I visualise in my head. I twist stories out of everyday life, everything around me, every scene, no matter how ordinary. I observe everything. What you see is a moment in time, the present, but you have the artistic freedom to imagine a past and a future.”

Over 300,000 people like Gi’s Facebook pages. Half a million people follow him on Instagram. His YouTube video – like the one described above – attract as many as three million views. He’s both an artists’ artist and a comic book illustrator known and loved by people who’ve never read a comic. His clients include DC, Marvel, Riot Games and Universal Pictures. And Gi being Gi, he can remember the moment it all began.

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