Sang Woo Kim walked into Select Model Management as a Central Saint Martins student picking up work between classes, and within two years he became the first Korean model to walk the Burberry runway, in fall-winter 2014.

Dolce & Gabbana cast him in its autumn-winter 2015 campaign, DKNY put him opposite Cara Delevingne the same season, and Diesel, Kenzo, Tommy Hilfiger, and Armani Exchange followed across a decade of runway seasons and advertising bookings. The face that photographers kept choosing belonged to a painter first.

Sang studied Fine Art at Central Saint Martins and Goldsmiths, and he has said plainly that modeling funded his freedom to keep painting. That freedom now runs through Herald St, the London gallery that represents him across its Bethnal Green and Bloomsbury spaces, where his self-portraits, dense with dappled, pointillist brushwork, turn the same gaze that once pointed a camera at him back onto himself.

Fantastic Man put him on the cover of its 2025 issue as the painter behind the work, a casting that says as much about where Kim’s career has landed as any campaign could. He still models, choosing the photographers he works with when he can, a form of authorship for a man who spent a decade being looked at before he started painting the look back.