Wooson Gallery is pleased to present the first exhibition of Chung Sang-Hwa in Daegu. This exhibition features more than twenty paintings from the early 70s to recent works together with related experimental drawings, prints from the early 70s. The exhibition provides an opportunity for the audience to rediscover his new reading of the ‘Dansaekhwa’ (Korean monochromatic painting) and its hidden dimensions. A monochrome canvas filled with small mosaic squares is typical of his work. Simple geometric patterns that are faintly visible may seem too simple and identical to contemporaries accustomed to monotone figures and images. The reason might be the consistent method of working and the endlessly repeated patterns of triangles and squares. However, as he remarks, yesterday will never be the same as today despite the apparent repetitiveness of everyday life. Chung’s paintings, without any clear and specific subjects may seem similar but are never exactly the same. Each of his paintings as well as every individual square in them is all distinctly different.
Although many art critics in the past have interpreted Chung’s painting in the context of the historical convention of minimalism due to his painting’s tightly controlled compositions, this seems to be a very limited interpretation. The typical American ‘minimalism’ of artists such as Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, or Sol LeWitt, restrained the subjective and emotional expression and explored materiality and its sensual presence, which differ from Chung’s intentions. If his work should be categorized in an art historical context, his paintings, which coexist with human emotion and systematic construction, are closely linked to ‘post-painterly abstraction’ by artists such as Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Frank Stella, where invisible spiritual conceptions of individual emotion and philosophy are manifested in the sensual appearance of painting. Art critics have proposed categorizing his work as ‘informal’ or classifying him as a ‘monochrome painter.’ But, instead of the philosophical interpretations, emphasizing the originality of his consistent method of art making of removing and repainting, that has carried from his early years to present, eventually become the most used description.
To sum up Chung's authentic method, first, the artist spreads a mix of water and kaolin clay evenly over the entire surface of the canvas to a 3-4 mm thickness, and when it is dry, he remove the canvas from the wooden frame. The artist draws a grid of horizontal and vertical lines on the back of the canvas to indicate where to fold, and then he folds the canvas while pressing it with a chisel. Once the canvas is unfolded, there are a net of squares. He does not insist on precise intervals between lines or on folding the canvas precisely guided by the drawn lines. After this process is finished, the artist reattaches the canvas to the wooden frame. He then removes from the surface the many pieces of kaolin clay one by one, which need thorough calculation to determine the order of removal. The process of painting the empty spaces where the kaolin clay was removed with acrylic paint leads to a building of layers on the surface of the painting as well as distinct boundaries between the squares formed by the removal of each piece of clay.
The many adjacent squares of the painting, despite their different sizes and shapes, are able to find existence and are brought to light through the organic relationship with each other.
Chung’s monochromatic planes achieve infinite temporality and universality through the endlessly repetitive process of this rigorous system. Infinite freedom of space can be manifested in the artist’s instinctive sense of contrast and reciprocal balance and harmony between geometric patterns of squares intersecting with regularity and irregularity. The colors on which he depends are quite limited not because of an ascetic attitude toward color but out of consideration for the organic space coexisting on the surface.
Chung began exploring this mosaic painting style of removing and repainting in the early 1970s, while he was based in Kobe. His methods of researching the meaning of space was fully realized with definitive formal consequences in the 80s. In his early period, Chung’s paintings reveal his passionate intensity and dramatical feeling which made sometimes wounded the surface of his canvases. Later on however, his painterly gestures have become more calm and rational trough the forty years’ of consideration and meditative processes. It can be said that this is a long self-discovering process and artistic self-reflection through the work of producing art. Through the repetitive labour in the method of making, the endless repetition of removing and repainting, which requires patience and persistence, Chung attempts to manifest something invisible in the canvas. This sequence of numerous repetitions is like the repetitiveness of life. Probably, Chung will keep repeating removing and repainting until his life is finished. The meaning of this rigorously repetitive labour throughout his lifetime is not just an exercise in craftsmanship but devotion to a passion for the nature of artistic action itself. In other words, there is no beginning and no end in any piece of artwork, and the working process itself becomes a work of art.
The famous architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's wellknown quote ‘less is more’, reflected the idea that less complicated forms are often closer to nature itself. This reveals the key point to help our understanding of the stark simplicity of Sang-Hwa Chung’s work. In order to introduce Chung’s art which becomes much more restrained and pure over time, Wooson Gallery presents twenty paintings chronologically from his rare early work in the early 1970s to the present, along with quite a number of early drawings and prints which are explorations and experiments in the process of removing and repainting.
Chung Sang-Hwa was born in 1932 in Yeongdeok, Gyeongsangbuk-do, South Korea. In 1956, he graduated from Seoul National University, Seoul, with a degree in the department of painting. In 1963, he held his first solo show at Joongang Public Hall, Seoul. During his stay in Paris from 1967 to 1968, he presented the solo show at Jean Camion gallery in Paris. After that in 1969, he moved to Kobe until 1976 where he had numerous exhibitions including solo shows at Gallery Kasahara and Muramatsu Gallery and Ueda Gallery in Tokyo, Motomachi gallery in Kobe, and Shinanobashi Gallery in Osaka. After that, he went back to France and pursued his artistic practice in Paris until 1992, when he returned to live in Seoul. He currently works from his personally designed studio at Gonjiam, Gwangju in Gyonggi Province. He has exhibited numerous exhibitions from local to international museums and galleries. Recently in 2011, a large retrospective exhibition was held at the Museum of Modern Art Saint-Etienne Métropole, France and in 2012, two large black and white pieces of his were acquired by the museum’s collection. In addition, his work is part of numerous permanent collections in public museums including the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, Leeum Samsung Museum of Art in Seoul, Seoul Museum of Art, National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art, and Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, in Japan.
Press release courtesy Wooson Gallery.