Among the first generation of artists educated in Korea after its liberation, Chung Chang-Sup was an influential abstract painter who experimented with Art Informel, monochrome painting, and Minimalism in a lifelong search for the identity of Korean art. He is especially known for his paintings on 'dakjongi' mulberry paper, or 'tak' works, produced by adhering wet fibres extracted from the tree bark directly onto the canvas. The last series of works he produced before his death, Mukgo, which means thoughts of silence, epitomises the achievement of his contribution to the modern Korean painting movement.

Born in Cheongju, Korea, Chung Chang-Sup recieved an MFA from the College of Fine Arts, Seoul National University. He held an honourary professorship there until the time of his death. His retrospective was mounted at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Gwacheon, Gyeonggi Province, in 2010.

After Sang-Hwa Chung repeatedly employs the method of action consisting of “taking off/removing” and “re-painting,” small trace forms such as squares or triangles remain. This action of “formless” goes beyond the representation expression of pictorial dimension. That is, the subtle edges of the squares or triangles are created in the process of taking off the surface rather than painted directly onto the surface. They are subtle traces randomly generated in a series of “repeated” working processes as additional elements, and yet, at the same time, these vestiges are the clandestine essence of his oeuvre.

Indubitably, Chung’s work deals with the awakening of the surface, or a reduction process toward the surface, through a logical and structural procedure. As much as the artist’s simple, repeated action is consistent, the colors on which he depends are quite limited, the main focus being given to the contrast of black and white; when blue and white are treated as gradation, dark brown tints are frequently visible. His recent work is characterized by blue hues; the tension in the contrast of black and white is replaced by the convergence of bright and transparent depth. There may be a compelling correspondence between the frequent use of blue color and blue sea, which he personally experienced, having been born in a harbor city and spending his adolescent years there. The artist most likely immersed himself in the sensibility and depth of blue color, which he directly observed. The shiny reflection on the surface of the water with sunlight overlaps on the surface of Chung’s work, which appears to create peaceful riffles. The artist cultivates his dreams while contemplating the blue sea and enduring the ages from a distance of time; he now looks back on the past of his traces as a form of meditation.

From [The Surface of the Canvas as a Form of Contemplation: Sang-Hwa Chung’s Oeuvre], Kwang Su Oh (Art Critic).

Ha Chong-Hyun Biography

Ha Chong-Hyun is a Korean artist known for his innovative approach to painting, and for having been a leading member of the Korean style of abstract painting known as Dansaekhwa. Roughly translated as 'monochrome painting', Dansaekhwa refers to the work of a group of loosely affiliated Korean artists—among them Lee Ufan, Park Seo-Bo, and Yun Hyong-keun—who in the 1970s pioneered an aesthetic that emphasises process, tactility, and surface.

Graduating with a BFA from Seoul's Hongik University in 1959, Ha began experimenting with geometric abstractions in the early stages of his career. White Paper for Urban Planning (1967) from the 'Urban Planning' series, for example, depicts angular shapes composed of straight lines and monochromatic gradients that echo decorative patterns found in traditional Korean architecture. In an interview with Ocula Magazine in 2017, the artist reflected that the series was inspired by the urban development that was then going on in Seoul, which led him to search for ways of creating 'modern works while incorporating something of my culture that has always been there'.

Ha's artworks are also marked by his use of inexpensive and quotidian materials, a trait he shared with many of his contemporaries working in post-war Korea. As the artist reflected in his interview with Ocula Magazine, he could not afford to produce large scales of only one type of work and wished to investigate the full range of materials available around him. In the installation Relationship 72-11 (1972), for example, Ha strung rope between two walls of a gallery and placed an upright wooden beam on top. He also incorporated barbed wire into his paintings, arranging it horizontally in Untitled 72-C (1972) or in a grid pattern in Work 73-15 (B) (1973). Burlap sack, which was dispatched by the United States for relief goods during and after the war in Korea, became one of his favoured canvases as well.

Around the same time as he was experimenting with burlap sacks and barbed wire, Ha began working with a method known as bae-ap-bub, which involves pushing paint through the back of the canvas. Though simple, this method allows for countless variations depending on the size of the pores in the fabric and the pressure with which the paint is applied. In his 'Conjunction' series (c 1970s–ongoing), Ha employs bae-ap-bub to create diverse surfaces that range from the vertical columns of light and darker shades of oil paint in Conjunction 79-11 (1979) to short, vertical strokes of white in Conjunction 05-171 (2005). Others, such as Conjunction 16-321 (2016), depict an array of short, angular marks that resemble the vowels of hangul (the Korean alphabet). Many 'Conjunction' paintings also foster a sense of dimensionality where the edges of paint congeal, as can be seen in Conjunction 14-136 (2014) and Conjunction 18-07 (2018), among others.

In his interview with Ocula Magazine, Ha explained that the word 'conjunction' 'is really the essence of my work: the conjunction between the materials—oil paint and hemp cloth—and my spirit and performance.' This concern with the intersection between the act of painting and the physicality of the materials that go into it is deeply in alignment with the philosophies of the Dansaekhwa artists at large.

Ha exhibits internationally, including at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Gwacheon (2012); Gyeongnam Art Museum, Changwon (2004); and Fondazione Mudima, Milan (2003), among others. In 2015, his work featured in the exhibition Dansaekhwa, a Collateral Event of the 56^th Venice Biennale. Widely recognised for his contribution to contemporary art in Korea, Ha served as the chairman of Korean Avant-Garde Association between 1969 and 1974, commissioner and advisor to the inaugural Gwangju Biennale in 1995, and the director of Seoul Museum of Art from 2001 to 2006.

A prominent figure in the first generation of Korean Abstract artists, Kim Whanki's works combine traditional Korean concepts and ideals with abstraction. Born 1913, in the South Jeolla province of South Korea, Kim Whanki moved to Japan at the age of 19, and enrolled in the Fine Arts programme at Nihon University, Tokyo. During this time, he joined the Avant-garde Institute in Tokyo, where he studied under Tsuguharu Fujita and Seiji Togo. Soon after his first solo exhibition which was held in 1937 at Amagi Gallery, Tokyo, Whanki returned to Korea and founded the Sinsasilpa Group [Neo-Realist movement] with Artist Youngkuk Yoo and Gyusang Lee.

During the mid 1950s, Whanki based himself in Paris, where he continued to enjoy solo exhibitions at M. Benegite Gallery, and the Institute Gallery among others. In 1963, he represented South Korea in the 7th Sao Paulo Biennale and received the Honorary Award in the category of painting. Throughout his career, Whanki served as professor at the Department of Art, Seoul National University, Seoul and as Dean and professor at Hongik University, Seoul. In 1964, he received a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation in New York, and showed a body of new work at Asia House Gallery. Kim Whanki passed away in 1974 at the age of 61, in New York. Today, Whanki is celebrated internationally as a pioneering figure among Korean Abstract painters, and in 1992, the Whanki Museum was founded in Seoul to commemorate the artist's life and achievements. 

Kwon Young-Woo (권영우) was considered a pioneering figure in the development of Dansaekhwa (or the modern monochrome movement), a Korean painting tradition where artists work predominantly with paper. Born in Korea in 1926, Kwon graduated from Seoul National University’s first art school class in 1951 alongside his contemporaries Park No-Soo, Suh Se Ok, Chang Un-Sang, and Park Sae-Won. He died in 2013.

Throughout his career, Kwon explored the textural abilities of his chosen medium by scratching, tearing, and layering sheets of hanji (traditional Korean mulberry paper) onto canvas and manipulating the material into three-dimensional relief sculptures which were then decorated with ink painting. Later in his career, Kwon removed any trace of representation and worked solely with white paper.

Kwon’s skill in altering a traditional material to reflect themes of Abstract Expressionism has led to him being recognised as one of Korea’s most groundbreaking artists. Recently, the artist’s works have been exposed to new audiences due to a resurgence in interest of the Dansaekhwa movement.

Kwon Young-Woo has been included in recent exhibitions such as From All Sides: Tansaekhwa on Abstraction at Blum & Poe, Los Angeles (2014); Dansaekhwa at Kukje Gallery, Seoul (2015); When Process Becomes Form: Dansaekhwa and Korean Abstraction at the Boghossian Foundation, Brussels (2016); and Dansaekhwa and Minimalism at Blum & Poe, New York (2016).

In 2007, six years before his death in 2013, Kwon donated 70 of his most important works to the Seoul Museum of Art.

As a progenitor of the Japanese Mono-ha, or School of Things, movement, Lee Ufan led a loose constellation of artists who championed the use of ordinary materials during the late 1960s, significantly altering the course of 20^th-century Japanese art. Lee's dense yet poetic text, Beyond Being and Nothingness—A Thesis on Sekine Nobuo, provided something of an intellectual foundation for the movement. The group eschewed representation, choosing instead to zero in on the relationship between perception and material. Its main aim—as expressed by its key figures—was to demonstrate the fluid coexistence of objects, ideas and encounters.

In 1956, Lee began studying painting at the College of Fine Arts at Seoul National University, but after two months he relocated to Yokohama, Japan, where he went on to earn a degree in philosophy in 1961. During this period, the restrained painting style of his student work was in formal and conceptual opposition to the free expression of Gutai—the performance-oriented post-war Japanese art movement that anticipated Fluxus and inspired the work of Yves Klein, Allan Kaprow and Nam June Paik.

In the mid-1970s Lee became one of the major exponents of Korean Dansaekhwa ('Monochrome Painting')—a style that became one of the country's most important artistic developments in the 20^th century—and the first from that period to bring the movement to Japan. Lee, along with the group's other loosely connected members, emphasised materiality as a means of producing relationships that link objects to viewers. In the repetitive gestural marks of his work, abstraction served to register the body's movement as well as the passage of time. With an eye towards modernist abstraction's best-known devices—seriality, gesture, grids and monochrome—Lee's paintings pushed the bounds of formalist paradigms. And through their affinity to and correspondence with Euro-American art, they proffered new forms of connection across seemingly incompatible ideological positions.

In his early painting series, 'From Point' and 'From Line' (1972–84), Lee combined ground mineral pigment with animal-skin glue, typical of the traditional Japanese Nihonga painting in which he had trained. Each fastidious brushstroke consisted of multiple simultaneous layers, and where the brush had first made contact with the support, the paint was thick, creating a 'ridge' that would gradually lighten. Rarely did Lee's brush touch the canvas separately more than three times, yet this economic application created a feeling of dynamic tension between gesture and picture plane characteristic of his paintings. In the early 1990s, Lee carried this through to his 'Correspondence' paintings, which consisted of a minimal number of grey-blue brushstrokes, applied on large white surfaces.

Lee's more recent and ongoing 'Dialogue' series, begun around 2006, considers philosophical notions of emptiness and fullness. These exist within a lineage of work that dates back to earlier works such as the 'From Line', 'From Point' and 'From Winds' series, which in the 1970s marked his transition from relatively small strokes predominantly in blue and orange to the intermixing of those colours and the predominance of grey tones from the 1980s.

Today Lee views his pristine white supports, enlivened by touches of paint, and his large site-specific sculptures made from stone and iron as materially opposed to the virtual nature of screen-based media that has now become so ubiquitous.

Although he is highly regarded as a painter, one of Lee's best-known series is 'Relatum' (1968–), three-dimensional groups of rocks dispersed with industrial materials such as steel sheets, glass panes and rubber. Lee began producing them as a response to 1960s Japan and its intensely turbulent socio-political climate. In each of these assemblages, the artist emphasises how constituent parts sit in relation to one another, to space and to surrounding objects, going beyond the enclosed network that is implied by the term 'sculpture' and its more conventional examples.

As well as being the recipient of numerous awards and honours, Lee is also represented in numerous prominent collections around the world. These include The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate Modern, London; The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto; and The National Museum of Art, Osaka.

In 2010, the Tadao Ando-designed Lee Ufan Museum was opened at the Benesse Art Site on the Japanese Island of Naoshima, dedicated to the artist and his legacy. Lee—a professor emeritus at Tama Art University, Tokyo, where he taught from 1973 to 2007—divides his time between France and Japan.

One of the most significant artists in modern Korean history, Park Seo-Bo was born in 1931 in Yecheon, Gyeongbuk, South Korea. As a young artist in the 1950s, Park was among the first to introduce abstraction to Korean art and is best known as a founding figure of the art movement, Dansaekhwa.

Dansaekhwa, also known as baeksaekpa (the School of White), refers to a group of paintings in Korean art that began to appear in the late 1950s and fully emerged in the art world by the mid-1970s. Translated as 'monochrome paintings', Dansaekhwa is characterised by minimal colour palettes, repetitive gestures and manipulation of the canvas or paper through soaking, tearing, pulling and other techniques. Park and contemporaries such as Lee Ufan, Chung Chang-Sup and Kwon Young-Woo began incorporating abstract motifs and unconventional techniques in their works as a reaction against the prevailing academicism. Dansaekhwa was also a response to the unstable conditions in the country at the time; 35 years of Japanese Occupation and the Korean War had been replaced by a conspicuous American presence. Many artists expressed their perception of a changing Korean cultural identity through paintings that wedded Western and Eastern techniques. Despite its introduction as a 'movement' to the West, however, Dansaekhwa was never an official movement and the term itself was coined in retrospect by the curator and scholar Yoon Jin Sup in 2000.

Although abstraction in Korean art was influenced by North American Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism, Park's paintings are not an uncritical absorption of outside influences but rather a negotiation between the traditional and the new. 'Ecriture'—his most famous and ongoing series conceived in the 1960s—uses Western Modernist techniques of painting on traditional Korean hanji paper. In early works, Park used a pencil or a stylus to make repetitive marks on the canvas, but since the 1980s he has been manipulating the pulp of hanji paper while its surface is wet. Myobop—as 'Ecriture' paintings are known in the Korean language—means 'law of drawing', a phrase that reveals the artist's interest in Taoist and Buddhist philosophies. Further nicknamed 'the journey of the hand', the process of repetition eliminates individual gestures and becomes one of meditation.

Paintings in the 'Ecriture' series have experienced stylistic changes over the years. Park's work from the 1990s and early 2000s were black and white, two of the most important colours in East Asian philosophy—black represents time and pure emptiness, while white alludes to death spirituality and the void. Since 2002, Park has incorporated other colours as well, using acrylic paint to mould linear patterns on the wet pulp of hanji paper. From a distance, these monochrome paintings appear to be one colour or empty. Borrowing the language of abstraction, rejecting painterly codes from Western Modernism and combining these methodologies with Eastern philosophies, Park attempts to capture and convey the 'ideal of emptiness or "no mind"', according to a press release from Tina Kim Gallery's 2016 solo exhibition of Park's work.

Park has also led an impressive career as an educator of art in South Korea. Between 1962 and 1994, he taught as a professor at Hongik University, Seoul—one of the most prestigious institutions of art in the country and his alma mater (from which he graduated in 1954). In 1986 he became the Dean of the College of Fine Arts, a position he would hold until 1990. Park continues to participate in the contemporary Korean art scene through his Seo-Bo Art and Cultural Foundation, Seoul-based and founded in 1994.

Park's work has been recognised both nationally and internationally. He has exhibited in many institutions across Asia, the USA and Europe, and has exhibited twice at the Venice Biennale (2015, 1988). Referred to as the father of Dansaekhwa, Park's paintings have been included in several group exhibitions, including When process becomes form: Dansaekhwa and Korean abstraction, the Boghossian Foundation, Brussels (2016); Dansaekhwa and Minimalism, Blum & Poe, Los Angeles (2016); and Dansaekhwa, a Collateral Event of the 56^th Venice Biennale (2015). Park was awarded the President's Citation in 1972 and received the Silver Crown Cultural Medal for his services toward the advancement of contemporary art in Korea in 2011.

When Process Becomes Form is the first comprehensive presentation in Belgium of a number of seminal works by a generation of Korean artists whose negotiation of abstraction has become known as Dansaekhwa.The exhibition consists of some 50 paintings and works of paper drawn from the 1970s and the 1980s, along with a substantial array of archival...

The Dansaekhwa monochrome movement is a synthesis between traditional Korean spirit and Western abstraction, which emerged in the early to mid 1970s in Korea. The artists affiliated with the movement primarily share a restricted palette of neutral hues – mainly white, beige and black – from which the term dansaekhwa (‘single...

Without a central art district, Brussels plays host to a range of independent and alternative art spaces, and some outstanding galleries. The discordant politics of the city has cultivated an anti-authoritarian sense of artistic freedom drawing a