Kwang-Hyun Kim is a South Korean artist and manhwa creator, born in 1982 in Busan, South Korea. Raised in a family of artists with a cartoonist father and an illustrator mother, he was immersed in drawing and visual storytelling from an early age. He earned a degree in traditional Korean painting from Kyungsung University and gained experience working on the restoration of Japanese Buddhist artworks, an influence that helped shape his distinctive visual language.

Kim is best known internationally as the illustrator for the popular action manhwa series Freezing, created in collaboration with writer Lim Dall-Young. The series, which features genetically engineered girls fighting interdimensional aliens, was adapted into two anime television seasons: Freezing and Freezing Vibration. An art book titled Reminiscence: Kwang-Hyun Kim Freezing Illustrations, collecting his cover art, character designs, and rare pinups from the series, was published by UDON Entertainment in 2016.

Prior to Freezing, Kim and Lim Dall-Young collaborated on the manhwa Aflame Inferno, which was published in South Korea by Haksan Culture Company from 2006 to 2011 across six volumes. The story follows a fashion model who becomes a hybrid human-demon after merging with a powerful entity named Inferno. Kim's early work as an illustrator also includes the manhwa Zero.

In addition to his commercial manhwa work, Kim maintains an active career as a fine artist, with his paintings exhibited internationally in galleries across Madrid, New York, and Taipei. His fine art practice explores themes of loneliness, contemplation, passion, and misunderstanding through detailed acrylic paintings on canvas. His characters often feature intentionally ambiguous or distorted facial expressions, which he uses to question how faces and identities are read and interpreted. Recurring figures in his paintings include two protagonists named Pipzin and Gatak, who represent intuition and inner clarity, and the tension between cultivation and desire. Kim's artistic style blends traditional East Asian brushwork and layered washes with the textured immediacy of spray paint. His 2024 solo exhibition in Taipei, titled OHEA, derived from the Korean word for misunderstanding, invited viewers to actively participate in creating meaning from his work.