Paju, South Korea - South Korean sculptor Kim Yun Shin wields a chainsaw with a quiet focus, refining a craft the 91-year-old has honed over decades spent far from home.

Long overlooked in her home country, Kim has more recently gained recognition as a pioneering artist, featuring in a sweeping retrospective at South Korea’s esteemed Hoam Museum of Art.

The solo exhibition, titled Two Be One, is the institution’s first since its founding in 1982 to spotlight a woman artist, and includes some of her signature abstract sculptures hewn from hardwood with her tool of choice.

“The saw is my body,” Kim told AFP in her studio in Paju, a city northwest of the capital Seoul. “When I lift it and cut (the wood), it has to move exactly like me – the saw has to become me, and I have to become the saw.”

Hoam is exhibiting about 170 of Kim’s sculptures and paintings, reflecting her reverence for nature and blending spirituality with meditations on existence, material and form.

Born in 1935 in Wonsan, now in North Korea, she grew u...