Ha Chong-Hyun Retrospective: National Museum of Contemporary Art (NMOCA), Gwacheon, Korea

The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea (NMOCA) presents the exhibition Ha, Chong-Hyun Retrospective from 15th June - 12th August, 2012. To help establish a comprehensive history of contemporary art in Korea, the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea organizes ehibitions that explore the original art worlds of pioneering senior artists. This year, the museum will host an exhibition to look back on the art and life of Ha Chong-Hyun, one of Korea's respresentative abstract artists. 

This retrospective covers all periods of Ha Chong-Hyun's artistic career, starting from his early years in the 1960s and  AG (Korean Avant-Garde Society) years in the 1970s, to his prime years characterized by the development and establishment of his unique abstact painting series Conjunction and recent Post-Conjunction years. 

Ha Chong-Hyun's Conjunction series, created by the coalescence of paint and hemp cloth, started in 1974 and continued through 2009 for over 35 years, becoming the most representative work of Ha Chong-Hyun's practice. Conjunction casts aside the preconceived notion that painting should be done by applying paint on the surface of a picture. By coming up with an original method of painting by pushing pigment from behind the picture, Ha broke new ground in abstract painting. When the paint is pressed down from the backside of hemp cloth woven with thick threads, the paint comes out to the front of the cloth through is coarse weave.

Critics would liken Ha's Conjunction to the earthen wall of a country house made with clay and rough straws or to the thickly condensed solution that drips through a hemp cloth when twisting the cloth to squeeze liquid out of boiled medicinal herbs. In Conjunction, Ha Chong-Hyun's interest lies in the conservation with materials. In order to reveal the expressions the paint and the canvas make on their own, pocesses utilizing not only eyesight but tactile sense are also repeatedly carried out. 

It is hoped that this retrospective, in which Ha Chong-Hyun's representative works are displayed, will be an opportunity to shed new light on artist Ha Chong-Hyun's art world that has been rigorously cultivated in Korea's contemporary art field over the past 50-odd years, and also to retrace the history of the half-century of abstract painting in Korea.