NYCC 2022: Fans Pay Tribute to Artist Kim Jung Gi

NYCC 2022 fans pay tribute to artist Kim Jung Gi: what happened

Kim Jung Gi was due to be at New York Comic Con in October 2022, both as a speaker and as an exhibitor in Artist Alley. He died on Monday, October 3, at age 47, of a heart attack, in the week he was due to travel to the United States. He was in Paris, where his artwork was on show at the Daniel Maghen gallery, and collaborator Hyun Jin Kim announced the news on social media.

His table was still there when the convention opened. By 3:30 p.m. on Thursday, a few hours after Artist Alley opened, nearly every inch of it was covered. Visitors wrote notes, signed the surface as if it were a condolence card, left flowers and cards, and a few added their own art, either on paper or drawn straight onto the table.

Fans kept arriving through the day to pay their respects, squeezing their names or messages into whatever white space remained.

The table was left up, and flowers and messages stayed on it. DC's Jim Lee described him as a truly phenomenal talent and named his live drawing as a highlight.

What the notes said

Many of the messages thanked him for inspiring them. One, signed in English and Korean, read: “Thank you for what you did for the Korean community.” Another said: “You are an inspiration to so many, and your legacy will live on. Thank you for all you have done for the art world.”

They are simple sentences, and they are what makes the scene affecting. A table meant for selling prints and signing sketchbooks had become a place where strangers could say thanks to someone they were never going to meet.

The last drawing in Paris

Galerie Daniel Maghen, the Paris gallery showing his work, shared on Instagram a Batman-themed piece he drew in the city shortly before his death. It gave the tribute a second location: a finished drawing in Paris and an empty table in New York, connected by the same week.

He was due to speak at the convention as well as exhibit, so the table was one part of a program that never happened.

Why artists in particular showed up

Artist Alley is where working comic artists sit beside their fans, so a vacant table in that row carries extra weight. The people who left drawings were speaking in the language Kim himself used: pen on a surface, in public, with strangers watching.

Live drawing was one of the main ways fans met him. Watching him fill a vast canvas with no sketch and no reference is a different experience from reading a comic, and it made him unusually present to the people in the crowd. A memorial of handwritten notes is a fitting reply to an artist whose reputation rested on being watched while he drew.

That context also explains the Korean-language notes. Kim was born in South Korea, in Goyang, and his work reached a global audience while staying closely tied to his home country.

Who was Kim Jung Gi? A guide to the artist

Kim Jung Gi was born on February 7, 1975, in Goyang, South Korea, and studied fine arts at Dong-Eui University in Busan. His legal name was Kim Jung Ki, and he chose the English spelling Kim Jung Gi in 2001. He began his career around 2000 and 2001 with mostly military-related work, and his first published series was Funny Funny, which dates to the early 2000s.

He became known for large, densely detailed ink drawings produced from imagination, without preliminary sketches, often in curvilinear perspective. His tools included fineliners, brush pens and ballpoint pens. Tributes at the time repeated the same description: sprawling, impeccably detailed scenes drawn from memory.

His turning point came in 2011 at the Bucheon International Comics Festival, where he drew live in front of an audience and covered the booth walls with paper instead of hanging framed prints. After that he traveled internationally for live drawing performances, and videos of them often reached millions of views on YouTube. It is the reason so many convention-goers had seen him work. In 2015 he attempted a Guinness World Record for the longest drawing by an individual in fisheye perspective, and ArtAsiaPacific lists him as a Guinness record holder in the Fisheye Art category.

He also drew for and taught at art schools. Before comics, he completed two years of mandatory military service in a Special Forces unit, where he memorized military vehicles and weaponry that later turned up in his drawings. He called his habit of observing daily life “collecting visual references,” and he preferred traditional ink brushwork to drawing tablets. He worked for the studio SuperAni, co-founded the AniChanga Art School with Kim Hyun-jin, and made instructional videos for Kazone Art Academy in Los Angeles.

Selected works and collaborations

His first collaboration was Tiger the Long Tail, written by Seung-Jin Park and published by C&C Revolution between 2008 and 2010. Later projects included SpyGames in 2014 and McCurry, NYC, 9/11 in 2016, both with the writer Jean-David Morvan, and collaborations with the artist Katsuya Terada in 2015 and 2017.

Western readers knew him through American covers as well. His credits include Wonder Woman, Civil War II, Motherlands, Hit-Girl, Fire Power and the Batman/Fortnite crossover, and he produced illustrations for the 10th anniversary of League of Legends. ArtAsiaPacific counts seven sketch collections with more than 4,000 pages of drawings, published over 12 years. In 2021 he painted a monochrome mural for the Centre for Comics and Interactive Narrative in Łódź, Poland, and in 2022 he was a guest at the city's International Festival of Comics and Games.

A museum for more than 6,000 works

After his death, a museum devoted to him opened in Paju, South Korea, on October 17, 2023. Kim left behind more than 6,000 works. The first exhibitions there were Kim Jung Gi Live, which ran from October 2023 to April 2024, and Filling and Emptiness, which ran from May 2024 to February 2025.

Kim Jung Gi timeline

Sources

• Kim Jung Gi, Wikipedia — career and date of death