Arya News - San Francisco`s Asian Art Museum sets aside Ha Chong-hyun`s `dansaekhwa` label to trace six decades of the artist`s experimentation with different techniques – against the backdrop of South Korea`s evolving socio-economic landscape after the Korean War.
SAN FRANCISCO – Rarely is painter Ha Chong-hyun introduced by his own name alone; the term dansaekhwa almost always comes attached.
Loosely translated as monochrome painting, it refers to a style shared by the likes of Park Seo-bo, Lee Ufan and Yun Hyong-keun, contemporaries who came of age in the wreckage of the 1950-53 Korean War and built careers out of muted palettes, repeated marks and slow, laborious processes.
Over the past decade or so, the label has also become one of the hottest commodities in Korean art, filling gallery calendars from New York to London and sending auction prices soaring. Dansaekhwa is to modern Korean art what kimchi is to Korean food: the one thing most outsiders know, and the one that’s been talked to death.
At the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, which is hosting what its curators call Ha’s first museum retrospective outside Korea, the “D-word” is hard to spot. Apart from a passing mention on the introductory panel, the wall texts walk visitors through how Ha scorched canvases with a torch, nailed barbed wire onto them and, most famously, painted them from behind. They also go into some detail on the history he lived through as the country went from a devastating war to military dictatorship and breakneck growth within a single lifetime.
An installation view of “Ha Chong-hyun: Retrospective” at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. PHOTO: SUPPLIED/ASIAN ART MUSEUM OF SAN FRANCISCO/THE KOREA HERALD
“For people here who know dansaekhwa, the message is that his story doesn’t end there,” said Lee So-young, the museum’s director and CEO. Outside of collectors and the art world, she added, the term probably does not mean much to American audiences anyway. Those visitors, she hopes, will simply find the works new. She recalled how one of the museum’s security guards, a painter on the side, told her that painting usually felt predictable to him, but that this show had genuinely surprised him.
“When you look at the whole arc of his work, dansaekhwa is honestly very limiting,” Lee said. “There’s so much more there.”
Guest curator Kim Sun-jung, artistic director of Art Sonje Center in Seoul, would rather point to the way the artist approaches his work. “What makes him special is the labor in his paintings, his visual language and his whole way of making them,” she said.
The label itself, Kim suspects, owes much to timing and money. “If Korea had been better off back then, I don’t think these artists would have been bundled into a movement,” she said. “I doubt they like being lumped together.”
What the show offers instead is a portrait of an artist who never stopped experimenting, set against the turbulent history that shaped him. That story begins in the early 1960s, when South Korea, still reeling from the aftermath of the Korean War, was among the poorest countries in the world. The canvases from those years are crusted with thick paint and bundles of thread, and some are scorched black in patches. They are murky, gloomy things that amount to a decidedly grim welcome, if an apt reflection of a nation still in ruins.
“Work 73” (1973), barbed wire on panel, by Ha Chong-hyun. PHOTO: SUPPLIED/KUKJE GALLERY/THE KOREA HERALD
By the late ’60s, the country was laying down its first expressways and concrete buildings were going up across Seoul. Ha responded with the “White Paper on Urban Planning” series, the hard-edged grids and radiating lines of which call to mind road maps and the busy intersections of a city under construction.
It was also around this time that his work grew more politically aware: “Counter-Phase,” shown here in a remake, stacks a year’s worth of newspapers with blank sheets in a thinly veiled dig at the press censorship under authoritarian rule. Other works bristle with barbed wire and tangled springs, evoking a nation fenced in by division and dictatorship.
The familiar works show up afterward, in an open space given over mostly to the long-running “Conjunction” series. This is where we get to see the artist’s signature back-pressure method, in which he pushes thick oil paint from the back of coarse hemp cloth and works with whatever oozes out at the front.
For a series built on a single technique, the changes from one decade to the next are impressive. In the ’70s, Ha mostly let the pressed-through paint be, leaving the surfaces flat. By the ’80s he was dragging it across the front in broad, energetic swaths; a decade later those swaths had loosened into looping brushlike marks that almost look like calligraphy.
An installation view of “Ha Chong-hyun: Retrospective” at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. PHOTO: SUPPLIED/ASIAN ART MUSEUM OF SAN FRANCISCO/THE KOREA HERALD
The textures vary just as widely. Some surfaces are spiky enough to recall his barbed wire works of the early ’70s, while others are as fine as beach sand. The dark canvases, with paint so thick and glossy it looks as if it has not dried, are arguably the most tempting. “I look at them and think of ice cream,” Lee said. “There’s this tactile quality that makes you want to reach out and touch them — please don’t.”
Ha began the “Post-Conjunction” works around 2010, when he was already well into his 70s. In some, thin strips of wood are wrapped in canvas with paint squeezing through the gaps in between; in others mirrors become the canvas or ink gets worked into the oil. Meanwhile, the once-subdued palette erupts into deep sea blues, candy-apple reds and smoky grays left by a torch.
The last stretch of the show features three recent works, two of which were completed just this year for the exhibition. “Post-Conjunction 26-503” lays bright stripes of oil and ink over a mirror, so that viewers see themselves and their surroundings reflected within the painting. “Conjunction 26-14” is a field of red so saturated it seems almost molten. For a painter in his 90s with little left to prove, capping a six-decade retrospective with work fresh out of the studio is no small statement.
“Ha Chong-hyun: Retrospective” is on view at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco from Sept. 25 to Jan. 25, 2027.
“Post-Conjunction 26-503” (2026), oil, ink and collage on canvas, by Ha Chong-hyun. PHOTO: SUPPLIED/KUKJE GALLERY/THE KOREA HERALD