Kim Chong Hak, Painter of Seoraksan, the contemporary Korean artist’s first US museum survey on view at the High Museum of Art, returns once again to the mountains—specifically, Mount Seorak, the titular Seoraksan and largest peak of the Taebaek Mountain range that runs along the eastern coast of the Korean Peninsula. Kim, whose family was displaced from the north during the Korean War, studied art and lived abroad before settling on Seoraksan in 1979, making its diverse climate his primary subject. Since then, the artist, who continues to paint, has produced a body of work both movingly quiescent and surprisingly boisterous.

Rather than narrating the history of the movement from manifesto to schism to journal to excommunication, or by mapping Surrealism as it radiated from Paris outward—strategies deployed by other recent retrospectives in Paris and New York—the curators in Munich partition their show into discrete “episodes” (the organizers’ preferred term) scattered throughout the galleries in neither chronological nor spatial order. The show is better for it.