Kim Tschang-yeul was born in Korea during the Japanese colonial era. After studying painting at the College of Fine Arts at Seoul National University (1948–1950), he moved to America and studied printing at the New York Art Student League (1966–1968). His painting style can be divided into three periods. The first occurred while he was living in Korea from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s, where he painted in the informel style that was popular with young artists of that time, which is epitomized in his work Rite (1965). The second, short-lived period was while he studied printing at the New York Art Student League. Here, Kim abandoned informel and instead developed works influenced by the abstract paintings displayed in the 1966 Primary Structures exhibition, working with Plexiglas or abstract paintings that contained minimalistic elements. The third period was from the 1970s onwards, when he arrived in Paris, where he developed his trademark, realistic water drop paintings, which were painted on the surfaces of newspapers or canvases in works such as Memory (1975) and Water Drops (1979). From the mid-1980s, he has depicted his water drops alongside calligraphy strokes or Chinese characters.