Kim Sunwoo's Top Price Nearly Doubled While His Median Painting Fell
Three numbers from the same four years of Kim Sunwoo's auction record: the record high up 88 percent, the median painting down 26 percent, and a like for like canvas up 34 percent. Only one of them is about price.
In 2022, the most expensive Kim Sunwoo painting sold at auction went for 72 million won, about 52,000 dollars. In May 2026 one went for 135 million, about 97,000. That is an 88 percent rise in the top price in four years.
Over the same four years the median Kim Sunwoo painting fell 26 percent.
Both figures come out of the same 249 lots. Neither of them is the number you want.
The median is measuring the sale, not the artist
Kim Sunwoo has sold 142 paintings, 92 prints and 15 sculptures at Korean auction since January 2022. Those are three different markets and I will come back to that. Start with the paintings, because that is where the two headline numbers come from.
| Year | Painting lots | Median | Top price | Lots over $36K |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | 37 | $25,974 | $51,948 | 27% |
| 2023 | 22 | $13,347 | $54,113 | 14% |
| 2024 | 28 | $20,924 | $70,779 | 14% |
| 2025 | 29 | $21,645 | $80,808 | 21% |
| 2026 | 26 | $19,120 | $97,403 | 38% |
The top price goes up every single year. The median wanders and ends lower than it started. The share of lots above 36,000 dollars is higher in 2026 than in 2022. A median that falls while both the top price and the share of expensive lots rise is not describing prices, it is describing which paintings came up for sale.
That is exactly what happened. In 2026, 42 percent of the paintings offered were 20-ho or smaller, the Korean canvas size that runs to about 53x45cm. In 2022 that figure was 24 percent. The median area of a Kim Sunwoo lot halved between 2024 and 2026. More small paintings came to market, so the middle of the range dropped, and none of that tells you what a given canvas costs.
Hold the size still and the answer changes again
The useful comparison is one size band across time. In Korea sizes are quoted in ho rather than centimetres, and 100-ho, roughly 162x130cm, is the format Kim Sunwoo's important paintings tend to be.
| Year | 100-ho lots | Median |
|---|---|---|
| 2022 | 9 | $36,075 |
| 2023 | 2 | $43,290 |
| 2024 | 5 | $42,569 |
| 2025 | 1 | $25,974 |
| 2026 | 9 | $48,341 |
Up 34 percent from 2022 to 2026, which is a real rise and a much smaller one than the headline.
The cleaner way to see it is the range rather than the median. In 2022, nine 100-ho paintings sold between 27,400 and 51,900 dollars. In 2026, nine sold between 42,600 and 97,400. The cheapest large Kim Sunwoo painting sold in 2026 cost more than eight of the nine sold in 2022.
The 2025 row is one lot, and it is worth its own paragraph.
The painting that sold twice
That single 2025 lot is a painting called The Protectors, 130x162cm, and it hammered at 36 million won, about 26,000 dollars, in February 2025. That is roughly what a 100-ho Kim Sunwoo went for in 2022, at a point when the band was sitting closer to 42,000.
It was made for an online charity auction run with a perfume house, Santa Maria Novella. A year later, in February 2026, it came back to auction and hammered at 59 million won, about 43,000 dollars. Up 64 percent in twelve months.
I do not read that as the market moving 64 percent in a year, because nothing else in the record moved that fast. I read it as the first sale being cheap. A painting made for a branded collaboration sale tends to be bid on as a branded object by people who came for the brand, and it usually takes a normal auction to find its normal price. If you buy in that kind of sale you may be getting a discount. If you consign into one you are probably giving it.
Paintings and prints are two different markets
The median Kim Sunwoo painting sold for 19,481 dollars. The median print sold for 938.
| Medium | Lots | Median | Range |
|---|---|---|---|
| Painting, gouache on canvas or paper | 142 | $19,481 | $469 to $97,403 |
| Print and edition | 92 | $938 | $43 to $2,453 |
| Sculpture, resin and painted steel | 15 | $938 | $361 to $7,576 |
Twenty-one times. And inside the print column there is a second split, the same one that runs through every artist who sells editions.
| Print type | Lots | Median |
|---|---|---|
| Silkscreen and screenprint | 18 | $1,227 |
| Lithograph | 3 | $1,154 |
| Digital and pigment print | 71 | $794 |
A silkscreen needs a separate screen cut for each colour and the artist is normally involved in pulling it. A pigment print is the painting photographed and output. Seventy-one of the 92 print lots are the second thing. If a listing says "Kim Sunwoo print" and does not say which process, assume digital until told otherwise.
There is an entry point here, which is more than can be said for a lot of artists at this level. The cheapest painting in the record sold for 469 dollars and the cheapest print for 43. Whether you want the 43 dollar object is a different question.
Wondering, sixteen times
One edition tells the whole story about supply.
A digital print called Wondering appears in the record sixteen times between February 2022 and June 2026, across three slightly different size entries that are the same image. It opened at 3 million won, about 2,200 dollars. Its most recent appearance, in June 2026, took 850,000 won, about 610 dollars.
Nothing about the artist changed over those four years except that his top price nearly doubled. The image kept coming back and the price kept falling, because every bidder could see what the last copy made and there was never a reason to reach.
Paintings behave differently, and the reason is that there is only one of each. Eight Kim Sunwoo paintings have come back to auction a second time. I checked each pair against the plate images rather than trusting the title and the dimensions, because two of them are catalogued at flipped measurements and one shares a title with a different canvas. Six sold for more, two for less.
| Painting | Size | Sales | Held | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Buen Camino | 162x130cm | Nov 2022 to Jul 2026 | 3 yr 8 mo | 68% |
| The Protectors | 130x162cm | Feb 2025 to Feb 2026 | 1 yr | 64% |
| Seekers | 45x45cm | Apr 2022 to Feb 2024 | 1 yr 10 mo | 40% |
| Journey | 45x53cm | Feb 2023 to Apr 2026 | 3 yr 2 mo | 38% |
| Beneath the Aurora | 60x72cm | Nov 2025 to Jul 2026 | 8 mo | 18% |
| Aurora Chasers | 112x145.5cm | Jan 2022 to Oct 2023 | 1 yr 9 mo | 14% |
| Dowie | 100x80cm | Feb 2022 to Jun 2022 | 4 mo | 5% down |
| Aurora Chasers | 91x116cm | Feb 2024 to Dec 2024 | 10 mo | 13% down |
Every painting held longer than a year went up. Both losses came back inside a year. That is not a coincidence and it is not really about the art. A work that reappears quickly carries a public last price that acts as a ceiling, and it invites the question of why the owner wanted out, which is the question that stops people bidding. The convention in the trade is three to five years. One of the eight, Beneath the Aurora, came back in eight months and rose 18 percent, so it is a tendency rather than a law.
Ten years of one bird
He was born in Seoul in 1988 and studied Western painting at Dongguk University. In 2015 he went to Mauritius for a month to research the dodo, and he has painted essentially nothing else since.
The dodo lived on Mauritius with no predators, lost the use of its wings, and was extinct by 1681, hunted out by people. Portuguese sailors named it after their word for fool. Kim's dodos are not doing nothing. They are on boats, watching the sky, tied to balloons, on their way somewhere. Before them he painted bird-headed people, a body that cannot fly with the head of the thing that can. The dodo is the same idea with the blame moved.
He works in gouache on canvas, which is unusual at this scale. Gouache is watercolour made opaque with white pigment, so it goes on flat, matte and saturated, with none of the gloss or depth of oil. The paintings look printed in reproduction and they do not look printed in the room.
The commercial record is long: Bulgari, Lotte, Starbucks Korea, a wine label, a securities firm, a public artwork on the exterior of Soma Museum. That kind of work builds recognition faster than exhibitions do, and it is worth knowing what it is not. The museum line on his CV is one solo show, at Gangneung Museum of Art in 2024. Everything else is commercial galleries and art fairs. He is represented by Tang Contemporary Art, who gave him a solo show in Singapore in 2026.
Where to look
Tang Contemporary handles the work and shows him at fairs. Gana Art has carried him at Kiaf and TEFAF Maastricht. Gangneung Museum of Art staged the 2024 solo, and Gwangju Museum of Art and Lotte Museum have both included him in group shows in 2025.
If you are looking at a painting, the thing to establish is the size in ho and whether the canvas is a normal gallery or auction consignment rather than something made for a brand. Both of those move the price more than the year does.
Auction data from K-artmarket, 4 January 2022 to 27 August 2026, retrieved 9 September 2026. Hammer prices, buyer's premium excluded, converted at 1,386 won to the dollar. Exhibition history and biography from the artist's archive and gallery pages.