Ha Chong-Hyun

On the occasion of his solo show at Cardi Gallery, the Korean artist presents works from the “Conjunction” series, which he realized between 1972 and 2019.

Ha Chong-Hyun is one of the most important figures in the history of post-war art, a prominent figure in the Dansaekhwa Korean art movement. Combining Eastern and Western pictorial traditions and challenging the strict demarcation between sculpture, painting, and performance, Ha Chong-Hyun contributed to redefine the language of painting.

In 1974 the artist began to focus on the materiality of painting and to use the canvas not only as a simple support: in the “Conjunction series”, according to which the purity of the pictorial medium and the physicality of the artist merge, Ha Chong-Hyun uses tools to push the oil color, monochrome, from the back of the rough canvas until it is filtered and emerges through the surface.