~~~~Almine Rech Paris, Matignon, is pleased to announce Ha Chong-Hyun's forth solo exhibition with the gallery, which will open on February 23, 2023 and run throughApril 1, 2023.

Ha Chong-Hyun's name as it is known in English is emblematic of his place within modernKorean history. The consonant ᄌ in his given name that follows his surname Ha (하) is farcloser to the 'j' sound rather than the 'ch.' Under the current revised romanisation ofKorean that went into effect in the year 2000, his name would have been spelled HaJong-Hyun. But with McCune-Reischauer, which was used in Korea since 1937, becomingthe official system from 1984 until 2000, Ha would have adopted the spelling as we knowhim by today. It is not that I have any interest in proposing a new spelling for Ha's name,but for those who do not speak Korean, I wonder if we could, in the space of this text, getto know the sound, tone, and texture of how Ha would be called in his own country, whathe would have been called by his mother, father, and friends: 하종현.

I mention this because it has great bearing on my encounter of the artist. Though he is anart historical figure as well as a contemporary artist to be reckoned with, I approach himfirst as I would an elder and therefore, my instinct in writing about Ha is to begin with hisname. In Korea, names are deemed so sacred that it is seen as an obscenity to utter the nameof an elder, whether teachers, parents, grandparents or other ancestral relations, directly.Therefore, when absolutely necessary to mention the name of such a person, it is anetiquette to repeat each syllable in the given name, followed by the word '자' for character,thereby relaying the name as a linguistic notion rather than as a singular proper noun. Hahimself is an artist who is sensitive to names and language around how his and the art of hiscontemporaries were talked about. In speaking about the term Korean Monochrome versusDansaekhwa, he has stated, 'I believe we cannot allow the West to name a Korean creation.It is indeed a somewhat unfamiliar name to us, but the works we do and the nameDansaekhwa share a certain tone and character.'

Ha Chong-Hyun was born in Sancheong of Gyeongnam province located in southeasternKorea during the Japanese occupation. Though his early years were spent in Moji insouthern Japan, he would return at age 10 after Korea gained its independence, and wouldspend most of his life in Korea, graduating from Hongik, a prestigious fine arts university inSeoul, six years after the end of the Korean War that led to the subsequent division of thepeninsula. Just one year after his graduation was the 19 April Movement, a student-leduprising which caused the inaugural President of South Korea, Syngman Rhee out of officeand into exile. A new democratic government was short-lived, and in 1961, Park ChungHee led a military coup and came into power, and remained South Korea's dictator untilhis assassination in 1979.

It was in this tumultuous socio-political climate that Ha would participate in the 2nd ParisYouth Biennale (1961), in the 4th Biennale de Paris (1965), and in the 9th São PauloBienal (1967) while actively showing in Korea. He founded the AG (Avant GardeAssociation) in 1969, which is not happenstance that it coincided with the year that theNational Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art opened, an event that Ha spoke outabout as 'belated yet fortunate,' as he had been a critic of Korea's lack of institutionalsupport for artists and the conservative national exhibition system that hinderedexperimentation among young artists. AG would have served as an antidote to theseinstitutional failings, hosting exhibitions and interventions as well as publishing a journal inwhich Ha himself contributed.

It is important to emphasise that hunger and poverty characterised Korean life followingthe Korean War. Not only had Koreans come out of oppression under the Japanese regime,living as second-class citizens in their own land, but unrest following Japanese surrender leftthe country in devastation. While rice is a staple in a Korean meal, there was hardly any, soKoreans had to rely on grains brought in by the United States stored in hemp sacks. Hawould remove any remaining grains and begin experimenting with the hemp, creating whatwould later become his Conjunction series. The largest sacks were about 100 by 80centimetres, which were the scale of his paintings at the time.

Ha creates the Conjunction pieces by pushing oil paint from behind the hemp surface,which leaves marks on the front. Ha then works and manipulates these traces with varioustools such as a palette knife or brush. In Conjunction 22-19 (2022), streaks of white oilpaint descend vertically down the light creamy beige hemp surface. While a streak of thiskind could trick the eyes as one of paint flowing downwards, gravity is flipped as the topportion is where a thicker sediment of paint is seen, and the even control of the paint thatappears to have been dragged down from this mass of paint betrays one's assumption of agestural, expressive act of the painter with his brush. The negative spaces between the paintspeak to the meeting of the paint and the hemp weaving. The word Conjunction in Koreanis 접합 (jeop hap), a word with a basis in Chinese characters 接合, 接 which means 'to connect' and 合means 'to combine.' For Ha, this conjunction is not about its effect but the act of it, theprecise moment where the two elements, in this case the paint and the hemp connect andcombine, not to create a combination, but to facilitate a phenomenological experience ofthe two.

Due to the pared down palette of his early work, often using white paint against an earthtone hemp, Western critics have interpreted Ha's work under the categories of calligraphy,Zen Buddhism, and perhaps even the minimalistic aesthetic of Neo-Confucian Koreansociety. Ha and his peers rejected these interpretations and rightfully so, contemporarycritics, curators, and art historians have worked to build foundational context to argueagainst such reductionist readings. However, these arguments could lead the reader stuck inbetween viewing Ha Chong-Hyun as a key figure in Korean abstract art, who may havebeen drawn to certain materials more for their formal qualities, versus Ha who was keenlyresponsive to the conditions of his country, a radical reactionary whose work served aspolitical defiance.

The Korean critic Lee Yil, who was an early champion of Ha Chong-Hyun's work and hisclose friend, noted that Korean avant-garde artists were not making art of rebellion orprotest, but one of participation. I dare to add, that in the economic, social, and politicalconditions that defined most of Ha's life, rebellion is not sufficient, or even applicable inthe way of Western understanding. All Koreans of Ha's generation speak of their nagginghunger and poverty, a reality that could not be escaped. Therefore, it was activeparticipation that inspired Ha and his contemporaries to support each other, to be able toeat, source materials, and to create a community where freethinking, as much as it wascensored, could be possible. It was this participation that allowed Ha to engage with hismaterials in their formal qualities and make up, while understanding their socialimplications. It was always this hybridity that Ha is invested in, in order to forge a languageof abstract art that he could call a Korean form.

Press release courtesy Almine Rech. Text: Diana Seo Hyung Lee.