[Artist Feature] Ha Chong-Hyun: Method and Materiality(ArtAsiaPacific, July 2022)

HA CHONG-HY UN

METHOD AND MATERIALIT Y

BY A N DY S T. LO U I S

Post-Conjunction 11-3, 2011, mixed media, 120 × 180 cm. Photo by Chunho An. Courtesy the artist and Kukje Gallery, Seoul/Busan.

Conjunction, 1974, oil on paper, 120 × 175 cm. Courtesy the Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul; and Kukje Gallery, Seoul/Busan.

Naissance-B, 1967, oil and collage on canvas, 145.5 × 193.9 cm. Photo by Sang Tae Kim. Courtesy the artist and Kukje Gallery, Seoul/Busan.

52

ArtAsiaPacific 129

Jul/Aug 2022

Artmaking is an arduous individual pursuit, one requiring countless hours of unfaltering persistence and patience from artists as they work toward an indeterminate goal: namely, realizing a singular artwork that shatters their perceptions and reshapes their creative outlook anew. In the brief history of Korean modern art since the Korean War, the most significant breakthrough of this sort materialized in 1974, when Ha Chong-Hyun fundamentally changed the rules of painting with Work 74-A (1974). Rather than applying paint directly onto a flat surface, Ha extruded paint through small fissures in the picture plane, deploying an insideout methodology that gave the appearance of paint emerging from somewhere within the canvas itself. This inversion of painting’s directionality was the key inflection point of Ha’s career, operating as a cipher for the diverse forms of expression found in his previous works as well as a new benchmark by which to calibrate the artworks that were to follow.

Work 74-A served as the genesis of Ha’s ongoing Conjunction painting series, which he has continuously developed since 1974, earning him widespread acclaim as a pioneering figure of Korea’s monochrome abstraction movement known as Dansaekhwa. His place in the artistic firmament was consolidated in the summer of 2022, when the 87-year-old artist mounted his first international survey exhibition at the Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation in Venice, as a collateral event of the 59th Venice Biennale. Offering a rare opportunity to see representative works from all periods of his nearly six decade-long career, the exhibition featured a remarkable selection of early works predating his breakthrough in 1974. At its core, however, this mini retrospective triumphed in its stunning presentation of Conjunction paintings that showcase the full scope of Ha’s experimental creative vision.

From the very outset, Ha sought to carve his own creative path.

After graduating from the renowned painting department of Hongik University in Seoul in 1959, he entered a Korean art world enraptured with Informel-style abstract expressionism that had been popularized in Europe a decade prior by the likes of Georges Mathieu, Antoni Tàpies, Jean Dubuffet and Jean Fautrier. Young Korean artists at the time aspired to join the ranks of these such towering figures by producing large-scale paintings covered with dense aggregations of dark paint applied in violent, bold gestures; although Ha initially adopted his own somber color palette and aggressive treatment of paint that evoked the traumas of the Korean War, glimmers of artistic discontent could already be gleaned from his works of the early 1960s.

While his peers primarily focused on probing the evocative depths of paint, Ha began incorporating unconventional materials and untested techniques to broaden the dynamic range of his works. Notable among these is Work C (1962), in which Ha seared the painted surface of the canvas with fire, generating splotches of sooty shadows that imbued the work with a stained and spoiled aesthetic. “I was interested in the ever-changing power of fire and the ways that it would impact my work,” he says, describing a “natural force that I was unable to control, but which I could temporarily borrow to develop my practice.” He also experimented with collaging other media and demonstrated a particular interest in the expressive possibilities of thread—in Amulette (1965), Ha ventured into sculptural territory, with sweeping masses of painted thread that subverted the flatness of the picture plane and challenged the presumed parameters of painting as an inherently two-dimensional medium.

Ha’s experimental inclinations grew bolder in 1967, when he pivoted to an aesthetic of stoicism that was diametrically opposed to his previous output, yet magnified the same material concerns.

Emblematic of this radically different mode of production was Birth-B (1967), a geometric abstraction filled with bright chromatic coloration, repetitive forms, and a use of the grid as a compositional device. More significant than this aesthetic shift, however, was Ha’s FEATURES

novel treatment of the canvas—he meticulously wove thin, uniform strips of additional canvas into the painting’s surface to produce radial striations of contrasting color. By pushing these threadlike strips of canvas back and forth through incisions in the stretched substrate, Ha found himself working both sides of the painting, revealing the potential of canvas to operate as a permeable medium.

Indeed, the physicality of this process became a conceptual catalyst for Ha’s eventual experiments in squeezing paint through the loosely woven matrix of hemp fibers, which would come to define his signature Conjunction series several years later. However, a more immediate outcome of the bilateral approach to painting he inaugurated in 1967 was a burgeoning proprioceptive engagement with the painting as an object, facilitating Ha’s subsequent experimental encounters with his materials.

Around the same time that he created Birth-B, Ha initiated a related series of abstractions engaging with the conditions of modernism that were gaining traction throughout the country and felt most acutely in the capital of Seoul. “As Korea underwent modernization and architecture was becoming more geometric,” he explains, “I started to create works based on the physical changes that were taking place in the world around me.” Such currents of change were reflected in his White Paper on Urban Planning (1967–69) painting series, which expanded the geometric compositional order of Birth-B while returning to the realm of pure painting. In these works, flat strips of color intersected with angular planes to unfold an illusionistic sense of depth and dynamism that resonated with Seoul’s accelerating growth—the city not only absorbed surrounding farmlands into its concrete sprawl, but also extended skyward as high-rises began to punctuate the urban landscape. Ha emulated this sense of multidimensional expansion in White Paper on Urban Planning (1967) by folding the bottom half of the canvas like an accordion, compressing its physical presence and revealing the inherent plasticity of the painting surface as an analogue for the urban transformation of Seoul.

Korea’s artistic milieu also underwent major changes in the late 1960s, when young Korean artists began organizing and affiliating themselves with groups and collectives that endorsed experimental approaches to artmaking. “At the time, there was little or no infrastructure for contemporary art,” notes curator Sunjung Kim.

White Paper on Urban Planning, 1967, oil on canvas, 112 × 112 cm. Photo by Chunho An. Courtesy the artist and Kukje Gallery, Seoul/Busan.

artasiapacific.com

53

Work 71-11, 1971, printed newspapers and blank newsprint paper, dimensions variable.

Courtesy the artist and Kukje Gallery, Seoul/Busan.

“It was the experimental energy and experimentation of artists, as well as the synergy between artists and critics, that generated the art scene and moved it forward.” Such experimental energy inspired Ha to establish the Avant Garde Association (AG) in repudiation of prevailing visual languages and artistic methodologies, together with a host of like-minded young artists and art critics. Among the latter was Lee Yil, who quickly became one of the leading critical voices and most ardent advocates for the artists of his generation, sharing their sense of responsibility to inaugurate a true avantgarde movement that engaged practices and institutions outside the hegemonic conventions of Korean art history.

Between the founding of AG in 1969 and its disbandment in 1974, Ha’s practice entered its most experimental phase yet, during which he produced a broad range of works—including sculptures and site-specific installations—that foregrounded notions of presence and relationality to which he had previously alluded.

As art historian Joan Kee points out, Ha and his AG cohort had grown “disillusioned with having to think of materiality in terms of reified categories of medium.” So, too, had much of the country become disillusioned with the authoritarian Park regime, which had intensified crackdowns on basic civil liberties. Ha integrated these dual concerns in his seminal installation Work 71-11 (1971), a simple arrangement of two stacks of newspapers placed directly on the floor. Although identical in height, only one of these consisted of actual newspaper pages, while the other was simply blank newsprint—a veiled criticism of Korea’s government-controlled media and repressive censorship.

Amid such a precarious social and political climate, Lee Yil envisioned the Korean avant-garde as an art movement of participation rather than protest, proposing a radicality that was “predicated on entering one’s most immediate present or reality, and breaking out of a solipsistic introspectiveness,” according to Korean modern art scholar Yeon Shim Chung. For Ha, the

Untitled 72-3(B), 1972, spring on panel, 74 × 150 cm. Photo by Chunho An. Courtesy the artist and Tina Kim Gallery, New York.

54

ArtAsiaPacific 129

Jul/Aug 2022

most immediate present of the early 1970s was one of paradox.

Advancements in communication technology had accelerated exchanges of information and knowledge around the world, while speech was aggressively stifled on Korean soil and progressive ideas all but outlawed. Moreover, although Korea’s economy was growing at an unprecedented pace, privation remained an inescapable fact of life for most ordinary citizens—including Ha, who abandoned his resource-draining painting practice in favor of two-dimensional experiments that made use of readily available industrial products and surplus materiel.

This crucible of contradictions forged one of the most salient principles in Ha’s subsequent oeuvre: the primacy of materiality as a conduit for expression, which allowed the artist “to remain where words are spared as much as possible,” as he later described. At his debut solo exhibition in 1972 at Gin Gallery in Tokyo, Ha allowed the physical properties of everyday materials to guide his engagement with their inherent formal potential, giving rise to two site-specific installations—each consisting of a single wooden beam and corresponding length of rope anchored to the walls on either side—that functioned as variations on a single theme. At one end of the gallery, he installed a beam flat against the wall so that it touched the ceiling and nearly reached the floor, where it was suspended in place by the rope that was pulled taut to support its weight; the other beam occupied the center of the gallery and fully extended from floor to ceiling, its corresponding rope hanging slack and forming a lazy loop around its base. In both cases, Ha’s minimal interventions yielded relational propositions that simultaneously reinforced and subverted expectations of stability and strength, deploying virtually identical visual signifiers to evoke divergent interpretations.

Ha also extended this consideration of materials as a metric for rethinking his engagement with canvas, serving as a foundation for his expanding vocabulary of abstraction. In 1972, he began binding barbed wire to canvases, creating horizontal courses that stretched from edge to edge, overlaying vertical and horizontal wires to create dense grids, attaching barbed wire along the perimeter of a blank canvas, and even detaching individual barbs that he then pressed directly into the canvas picture plane. In a series of related experiments, Ha mounted metal springs horizontally across large panels so that their elasticity was integral to each work, as in Untitled 72-3(B) (1972). Here, rows of springs extended from both edges of the panel toward its center, where they terminated in a tangled mass that seemed to burst from an internal rupture in the substrate, thus reifying their kinetic quality and destabilizing the work’s two-dimensionality. Such experiments with barbed wire and metal springs “distinctly foreshadowed the birth of Ha’s Conjunction series,” says Kukje Gallery founder Hyun-Sook Lee, emphasizing that his “ceaseless efforts to transcend the flatness of the pictorial plane are as radical an endeavor today as they were more than half a century ago.”

Of paramount importance to Ha as he explored alternative modes of activating the picture plane was an empirical internalization of materiality. “I have to do things with my own hands so that I can put my spirit into it,” he says, adding that “when the spirit and the self overlap, that is the moment when the artwork comes into being.” This philosophy would sustain his experimental practice as it approached its inflection point mid-1974, when Ha held his second solo exhibition at Myongdong Gallery in Seoul. In addition to a selection of site-specific installations and wall-mounted works made with barbed wire and metal springs, he presented a suite of new paintings that heralded a major breakthrough, reconciling his experimental tendencies and attention to materiality with his oil-painting practice that had remained dormant for several years. These works were the first instances in which Ha squeezed paint through the picture plane and allowed it to seep out the other side—either extruding FEATURES

Conjunction 74-24, 1974, oil on hemp cloth, 200 × 100 cm. Photo by Sang Tae Kim. Courtesy the artist and Kukje Gallery, Seoul/Busan.

it between wooden slats, as in Work 74-A, or forcing it through the loose weave of burlap canvas from back to front—as he developed the painting methodology that would irreversibly alter the course of his career.

Sometime after 1975, Ha began calling these new works Conjunction, signifying a literal coming together of canvas, paint, and the artist’s body. “What he realized with the concept of ‘conjunction’ was the dissolution of the subject-object relationship between the artist and the material,” explains art historian Phil Lee. “Just as the artist is the subject in art making, matter also plays a role as the subject. The unity of these two is what creates Conjunction.” Although Ha now refers to the act of pushing paint through the canvas as bae-ap-bub (literally, “back-painting technique” in Korean), when he first adopted this approach in artasiapacific.com

55

1974 it was far from a formalized methodology—he was acting on impulse, responding to the materials that were available to him and striving to produce something altogether unexpected through such a conjunction. “I’m not someone who likes to sit still,” he says, “I need to follow my desire to keep moving in order to create things. Change is the background of my practice and that is what I always execute.”

Following his initial experiments in which he offset the warm brown tone of natural hemp canvas with cooler shades of white paint, he gradually embraced other colors—first hemp-colored ochre in the late 1970s, then black, and finally shades of green and blue in the 1980s and ’90s. Los Angeles art dealer Tim Blum witnessed these changes across the span of several decades, having first encountered Ha’s work in Tokyo in the early 1990s at the artist’s solo exhibitions held at Kamakura Gallery. “His technique of pushing oil paint through the back of the canvas and manipulating it on the surface always struck me as singularly original,” Blum recalls. “The paintings I saw at Kamakura Gallery were mainly all-over compositions of green and brown hues, so when I visited his studio in 2013, I was impressed by how much he had experimented with color and composition in the decades since, always pushing the limits of expression within the parameters of his bae-ap-bub technique.”

Beyond these shifts in palette, Ha has also continually adapted the ways in which he disrupts the textured surfaces of his paintings.

A linear approach to mark-making dominated his earliest Conjunction works, whether by scraping a palette knife horizontally across the canvas or lightly scratching the painting’s surface on a diagonal bias to generate faint streaks evincing the physicality of the artist’s gesture. These works were “unrefined but had a delicate sensibility,” notes art historian Phil Lee, while the compact crosshatching method that dominated his practice in the 1980s yielded works that were “more refined, subdued and serene.” In due time, however, he began to venture into bolder territory by forcefully executing broad vertical strokes in a single direction, producing

Conjunction 18-52, 2018, oil on hemp cloth,162 × 130 cm. Courtesy the artist and Kukje Gallery, Seoul/Busan.

Post-Conjunction 21-201, 2021, mixed media, 73 × 61 cm. Photo by Chunho An. Courtesy the artist and Kukje Gallery, Seoul/Busan.

Installation view of (left to right) Conjunction 18-51 (2018) and Conjunction 18-12 (2018) at HA CHONG-HYUN’s solo exhibition, Kukje Gallery, Busan, 2019. Courtesy Kukje Gallery, Seoul/Busan.

56

ArtAsiaPacific 129

Jul/Aug 2022

sizable accumulations of paint that had been scraped aside. From the late 1990s onward, Ha has been increasingly drawn to this methodology, which lends his works an impression of momentum and strength that now defines his distinctive visual vernacular.

In his 1980 essay, “Neutralized Materialism,” Ha described his painting process as a repetitive performance “emphasizing the gap between the front and back of the canvas” in order to evoke “the presence of ‘the other side’ of an object, half of which is concealed and half of which is revealed.” Even today, Ha’s exploration of this gap remains a foundational concern in his practice, one that informs his theory of painting as a “structuralized picture.” His Conjunction works assert an overtly liminal structure in which paint pigment is held in a state of suspension within the stratum of hemp canvas—a literal “medium” connecting the front and back of the painting as well as a mediator facilitating the artist’s activation of the material properties of oil paint. Through these encounters between permeable substrate, viscous substance, and the artist himself, Ha endows his works with their inimitable presence and tactile tension that bespeaks the intensity and conviction of his experimental spirit.

This sensibility is compounded in Ha’s recent Post-Conjunction series, which he initiated in 2010 at the age of 75. In these paintings, Ha rekindles the technique used to create his breakthrough Work 74-A by inserting oil paint between canvas-wrapped wood slats, then pressing them together so that the paint squeezes out from the front. These works also channel Ha’s pre-Conjunction experiments and “relate directly to his early barbed wire works,” as New York-based art dealer Tina Kim observes, echoing the FEATURES

rectilinear division of space that they explored. She explains that “throughout his lifelong career as an artist, Ha constantly pushed himself to break away from the two-dimensional surface and sought ways to paint sculpturally.” His Post-Conjunction series exemplifies this imperative—the rippling slivers of pigment that protrude from the canvas elevate its material presence to an even greater degree than his Conjunction works and propose a secondary pictorial plane that seems to float above the stacked wooden slats beneath.

Perhaps the most radical characteristic of these works is their exuberant use of color, which prior to 2010 had been absent from Ha’s practice for more than four decades. Notwithstanding the paintings’ aesthetic resonance with the bold gradients in Birth-B and geometric bands of color in White Paper on Urban Planning, the Post-Conjunction series remains inextricably linked to the activation of the physicality of paint itself that has always been at the conceptual center of Ha’s practice since 1974. “I worked hard to avoid using existing materials, rejecting everything from canvas, paint to tools,” he said in a 2015 interview. “It is difficult to honor this goal and avoid using a material like oil paint, but I attempted to allow it to exist as a material and not as a paint medium.”

Ha’s single-minded pursuit of harnessing the full expressive potential of his materials reflects his profoundly avant-garde ideal of a utopian language of abstraction, achieved by distilling the intrinsic properties of paint and canvas and obliterating the duality of subject and object—not an easy directive, as Ha himself acknowledged: “The burden of this approach has made my artistic journey far more arduous than that of my peers. Still, I believe my footprint is much deeper than others.” artasiapacific.com

57