SEOUL.- Art Sonje Center is presenting Ha Chong-Hyun 5975, an exhibition dedicated to the early works of Korean artist Ha Chong-Hyun, spanning the years 1959 to 1975. Running from February 14 to April 20, this exhibition investigates how Ha’s materials and techniques evolved in dynamic interaction with the socio-historical context of South Korea. As one of the leading figures of the Korean monochrome painting (Dansaekhwa) movement, Ha’s innovative approaches have significantly contributed to contemporary discussions surrounding materiality and abstraction in art. This exhibition celebrates his long-standing artistic evolution, highlighting the relevance of his pioneering techniques and persistent innovation in today’s global art discourse.


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Ha’s early works reflect the artist’s response to the upheavals of Korean modern history, including the Korean War, rapid industrialization, and urbanization – reimagining social realities and his personal experiences. Rather than adhering to a single methodology, Ha continuously transformed his approach in an effort to transcend the boundaries of two-dimensional painting, responding to the shifting times he experienced and expanding his experiments with diverse materials and their qualities. This exhibition showcases the enduring vitality of Ha’s experimental spirit, evident in his reflections on vanishing traditions and the development of a new aesthetic language through everyday materials. By engaging with the historical messages and material explorations embedded in Ha’s work, visitors will uncover the imprints of time and the stories woven into the materials he has left behind.

Ha Chong-Hyun 5975 explores four stages in the artist’s career, from 1959, shortly after his graduation from Hongik University, to 1975, when he began the Conjunction series—now recognized as his most iconic body of work. The first section, titled “Post-War Devastation and Informel (1959–1965),” examines how Ha’s work, influenced by the Informel movement, captured the chaos, devastation, and uncertainty of the postwar era. The second section, “Urbanization and Geometric Abstraction (1967–1970),” focuses on Ha’s geometric abstraction on themes of rapid urbanization and economic growth, along with his blending of traditional and modern elements in the Naissance series. The third section, “The Korean Avant Garde Association (AG)—New Art Movements (1969–1975),” highlights his experimental works through his involvement with AG. The final section, “Conjunction—The Back-Pressure Method (1974–1975),” presents early examples of his renowned Conjunction series. Tracing these stages, the exhibition reveals how Ha’s early works evolved within their social and historical context.

Part 1: Post-War Devastation and Informel (1959–1965)

When Ha Chong-Hyun began his artistic career in the late 1950s, he drew inspiration from the European Informel movement, which rejected standardized painting frameworks and emphasized materiality. Ha reinterpreted Informel within a South Korean context, employing thick paints, scorched surfaces, and dark tones to reflect the chaos and scars of postwar society. Through these materials and actions, he visualized the collective memories of war and social upheaval, laying the foundation for his later experiments with material possibilities and the expansion of painting’s boundaries.

Part 2: Urbanization and Geometric Abstraction (1967–1970)

By the late 1960s, Ha Chong-Hyun began focusing thematically on the social changes driven by urbanization and economic growth. A premier example from this period is his White Paper on Urban Planning series, using structured forms to present an abstracted rendering of the rapid industrialization and modernization under the Second Five-Year Economic Development Plan (1967–1971). Using bold colors and repeating patterns, Ha visualized the creation and transformation of cities, as well as the dynamism of the emerging urban landscapes. Around the same period, he also created his Naissance series, which reimagined traditional Korean dancheong patterns and mat-weaving techniques, merging them with a modern visual presentation to explore the harmony between tradition and modernity. Both examples show two opposing elements: the loss of traditions by modernization and the rise of new, modern structures.

Part 3: The Korean Avant Garde Association (AG)—New Art Movements (1969–1975)

In 1969, Ha Chong-Hyun joined critic Lee Yil and ten other artists and theorists to establish the Korean Avant Garde Association (AG). Through this collaboration, Ha expanded his artistic scope, engaging deeply in aesthetic and philosophical exchanges. AG aimed to push the boundaries of Korean contemporary art through experimental practices, such as making use of various everyday materials reflective of South Korean society. From wire to newspaper, plaster, and springs, Ha gave metaphorical representation to the rigid social climate of the time, its media censorship, and social repression. This exhibition features a recreation of the artist’s mirror-based installation work Work (1970), which survives only through records from the time and is being presented to the public for the first time since its debut at 1970 AG exhibition. This work experiments with an avant-garde installation approach incorporating numerous mirrors and films showing cranial and pelvic X-rays.

Part 4: Conjunction—The Back-Pressure Method (1974–1975)

In 1974, Ha Chong-Hyun embarked on the series Conjunction, which began with the question of how it might be possible to transport the effects of his three-dimensional experiments onto two-dimensional surfaces. He devised the approach known as baeapbeop (the back-pressure method), using loosely woven burlap sacks as canvases. Paint is generously applied to the reverse side and then pushed through the fabric using a large wooden scoop – enabling a process initiated on the back of the canvas, to emerge on its front. This approach of creating three-dimensional textures and depths as paint seeps through the burlap weave, transcends mere visual effect to embody a combination of materiality and the artist’s physical engagement with the medium. Conjunction remains an important series representative of Ha’s body of work, which has been continuing since 2010 under the title Post-Conjunction.

Ha Chong-Hyun (b. 1935)

A 1959 graduate of the painting department at Hongik University, Ha Chong-Hyun served as dean of the university’s College of Fine Arts from 1990 to 1994 and director of the Seoul Museum of Art from 2001 to 2006. Through his ongoing experiments in materials and materiality, he developed a unique painting style characterized by pushing thickly applied paint through the back of the canvas and leaving traces through sweeping and scraping gestures. Since the 2010s, he has continued to expand on his early experimental spirit by incorporating new materials such as various colors, mirrors, and fabrics. His work has been shown through various solo exhibitions at galleries in major cities such as New York, London, and Paris. He has also had notable solo exhibitions at the Daejeon Museum of Art (2020); the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (2012); Gana Art Center (2008); and the Gyeongnam Art Museum (2004). His work has been featured at group exhibitions at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2023); Denver Art Museum (2023); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2019); Yuz Museum Shanghai (2017); Brooklyn Museum (2017); National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (2012); Prague Biennale (2009) among others. His works are also part of the collections of esteemed art institutions, including Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo; Centre Pompidou, Paris; National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea; and the Leeum Museum of Art.


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