00:01South Korean sculptor Kim Yeon-shin gets ready to work in her studio.
00:06Her tool of choice, a small chainsaw used to carve abstract works from the trunks of trees.
00:12Even at 91 years old, Kim is still going strong.
00:16After all, she's been doing this for most of her life,
00:18inspired by the time she spent as a child in the Korean countryside.
00:24From a young age, nature was my friend.
00:27There was no one at home and no one in the neighborhood, so I played by myself.
00:32In the woods near her home in what is now North Korea, Kim created an imaginary world.
00:38She witnessed the trees there cut down for fuel,
00:40something that drove her desire to begin recovering and transforming felled trees into works of art.
00:48If you cut them down and throw them away,
00:50the trees just rot and disappear.
00:53But if you gather those cut pieces and transform them into sculptural art,
00:58they survive and exist forever.
01:01Perhaps, maybe, I liked trees so much and hoped for that.
01:05Kim's works are being featured in a new retrospective
01:09at South Korea's renowned Hoam Museum of Art.
01:12But the recognition she's now enjoying in her homeland is actually quite recent.
01:16The artist spent most of her career, nearly 40 years, in Argentina, drawn by the South American country's abundant trees,
01:24and seeing it as a way to escape the repressive atmosphere in Korea, then under the rule of a brutal
01:30military dictatorship.
01:32It was in Argentina where she took up chainsaw carving.
01:37A saw can cut hard and create texture.
01:41Other tools can do that too.
01:43But this is powerful, and as I get used to it, it becomes one with me, allowing me to cut
01:48freely.
01:49That's something others can't do unless they're accustomed to it.
01:53Kim's decision to pursue her passion in such a faraway land has drawn admiration back home.
02:01I personally find that truly remarkable.
02:04The fact that she was drawn to Argentina without any prior ties, solely by the trees of Argentina.
02:12And it didn't end there.
02:13She absorbed the local culture, nature,
02:16ultimately shaping and completing her own distinctive artistic world.
02:20I believe this is the key point that deserves close attention.
02:25With her trusty chainsaw and her newfound prominence in South Korea,
02:29Kim is blazing a trail for the country's women artists,
02:32showing that the costs of following one's life dreams is worth the reward of achieving them.
02:37John Tsu and Jeremy Olivier for Taiwan Plus.
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