The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA, Director Youn Bummo) presents a large-scale solo exhibition of one of Korea’s representative monochrome-abstract artists, Chung Sang Hwa, from 22 May through 26 September 2021, at MMCA Seoul.
The exhibition Chung Sang Hwa intends to provide a retrospective of as well as a renewed look at the artist’s authentic body of work and contextualize it within the history of Korean abstract art. With painting as his main method of production, Chung has experimented with diverse techniques including printing, drawing, décollage, and frottage to explore the potential of the flat surface. Since the 1990s, he has developed his own meditative methodology and presented an idiosyncratic series of monochrome works. This exhibition, while broadening the foundation of Korean contemporary art, highlights both the historical significance and contemporary context of Chung’s works.
Born in Yeongdeok, Gyeongsangbuk-do, in 1932, Chung Sang Hwa enrolled in the Department of Painting at Seoul National University in 1953. After graduating in 1957, he participated in numerous regular and group exhibitions, including the Contemporary Artist (1958), the Actual (1962), and the Invitation Exhibition of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (1963), and also represented Korea as an artist at the Biennale de Paris (1965) and the Bienal de São Paulo (1967). He traveled to Paris in 1967 and returned to Korea a year later; later, he would live and work in Kobe, Japan, between 1969 and 1977 before traveling back to Paris in 1977 to immerse himself in work there until his 1992 return to Korea.
In 1996, Chung built a studio in Yeoju, Gyeonggi-do, and has continued to produce works in Korea. As a university student, he primarily painted figurative, representational images, but in the mid- to late 1950s he began experimenting with atypical informel-style painting. Around the same time that he traveled to Kobe, he began pursuing a shift away from informel toward monochrome work. It was during the artist’s time in Kobe and Paris during the 1970s and 1980s that he established the grid-like canvas structure that is now so strongly associated with his work. Experimenting with various techniques and media, he discovered his own formative methodology rooted in the act of “peeling off and filling in.”
The grid composition, the fruit of Chung’s authentic experimentation with abstraction, is the result of meticulous planning and patience as well as intense physical commitment. First, using a brush, the artist primes the canvas with kaolin until it forms a three- to five-millimeter-thick layer. This process alone takes about a week, after which he folds the canvas along vertical, horizontal, or diagonal lines that he marks out on the back of the canvas, creating natural cracks and crevices on the surface. Using tools, materials, and methods that are often used to produce sculptures or craftworks, Chung “weaves out” his frames. The cracks created on the canvas through the act of breaking, folding, and cutting achieve more profound depth through the artist’s method of “peeling off and filling in.” He repeatedly peels off the gridded kaolin pieces and fills in each empty cell with layers of acrylic paint until the canvas becomes the sum of many small squares that each embody an individual rhythm. It is through this monotonous, labor-intensive, and repetitive process that Chung has built his one-of-a-kind formative world.
From Seoul and Kobe to Paris and Yeoju, this exhibition bridges the various locations and periods of the artist’s career and chronologically traces the journey through which he established his unique productive system. Simultaneously highlighting Chung’s formative study and material experiments through never-before-seen works, the exhibition notably features his paper and frottage works that have often been excluded from exhibitions in Korea.
Chung Sang Hwa is composed of four sections: “Experimentation on the Abstract,” “Transition to Abstract Monochrome Painting,” “Perfection of the Grid,” and “Beyond Monochrome.” These are accompanied by a special themed section titled “Paper and Frottage” and an archive section that displays videos, records, and early paper works that overview Chung’s career from multiple angles.
The first section, “Experimentation on the Abstract,” deals with the period between 1953 and 1968, covering Chung’s college years and activities in Seoul. This section captures his transition from figurative, representational paintings to abstract works that reflect his sense of loss and anxiety as an artist of the first post-Korean war generation such as Work 64-7 (1964) and Work 65-B (1964).
The second section, “Transition to Abstract Monochrome Painting,” features works produced in Kobe, Japan, between 1969 to 1977. During this period, Chung began to deviate from expressionist abstraction and move toward producing monochrome-abstract works such as Work G-3 (1972) and Untitled 74-F6-B (1974).
The third, special themed section, “Paper and Frottage,” surveys the 1970s and 1980s, when the artist began experimenting with paper, a material that is easier to manipulate than canvas, in an effort to develop a signature medium and technique. This section presents the paper and frottage works produced during this period, which have remained relatively under-explored in Korea.
The fourth section, “Perfection of the Grid,” follows Chung’s course of work in Paris, where he resided from 1977 to 1992 after his departure from Kobe. During this period, he perfected his monochrome-abstraction methodology based on the process of “peeling off and filling in” that he had discovered in Kobe and produced many variations of this grid-format work.
The fifth section, Beyond Monochrome,” introduces works produced from the time of Chung’s permanent return to Korea in 1992 to the present. Works such as Untitled 95-9-10 (1995) and Untitled 07-09-15 (2007), which demonstrate the epitome of Chung’s monochrome abstraction as well as his characteristic sense of depth created by the layers of paint, attest to the level of artistry he has achieved, presenting the viewers with a synesthetic experience in which not only their visual but also tactile senses are awakened.
Youn Bummo, director of the MMCA, notes, “This exhibition, which provides a retrospective of Chung Sang Hwa’s over 60 years of artistic endeavors, is an opportunity to grasp the essence of an artist who has significantly contributed to the status of Korean abstract art. It is a chance to reassess the artist’s preeminent body of work within the context of Korean art history.”
