Kang Seok Ho @ Tina Kim Gallery, NYC - 'Hold Still' Exhibition

Kang Seok Ho: Hold Still 

Tina Kim Gallery, New York 

November 20, 2025 – January 24, 2026 

The winter sea the eyes have seen is wider than itself.

—Kang Seok Ho, Seeing, 2017

Tina Kim Gallery presents Kang Seok Ho: Hold Still, the gallery’s second solo exhibition of the late Korean artist. Bringing together Kang’s Couple and Nude paintings—created between the mid-2010s and 2021—the exhibition traces the artist’s sustained engagement with the human figure as a site for exploring painterly surface, materiality, and form. Depicting bodies and intertwined faces yet stripped of narrative and erotic intent, these works reflect Kang’s deep fixation on painting itself—and his fascination with how the effort to see and depict another contains the paradox of closeness and distance inherent in human relationships.

Kang Seok Ho (1971–2021) studied sculpture at Seoul National University and trained under Jan Dibbets at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, receiving his MFA in 2001 before returning to Seoul. His contemporaries included Park Chan-kyong, Haegue Yang, Chung Seoyeong, and Kim Beom, among others. At a time when the critical discourse in Korea revolved around multimedia and conceptual practices, Kang Seok Ho turned instead to the language of painting itself. He studied the Old Masters—both Western and Eastern—and was particularly drawn to the techniques of Piero della Francesca, Giorgione, and Tintoretto, whose treatment of color and light he admired in their depictions of skin. Yet Kang deliberately resisted virtuosity, developing a distinctive method of tapping a brush dipped in thinned paint to build up delicate, uniform layers, creating textured surfaces where pigment both reveals and mimics the weave of the linen beneath. Informed by the philosophy of East Asian landscape painting—which privileges the subjective interpretation of nature over direct representation—Kang approached every subject, including the human figure, as a kind of landscape: a terrain for exploring gesture, surface, and dimensionality in paint.

Kang’s methods, however, were distinctly contemporary, exemplified by his use of photographic sources—first explored in his Get Up series, which zoomed in on clothed torsos and buttocks, omitting faces and other identifiers. Working from photographs—some his own, others drawn from media—he isolated and enlarged fragments of images, taping off sections to re-angle and translate them onto canvas. Focusing on details such as the wrinkles in denim where thighs meet or the beads of a necklace resting against a collarbone, the Get Up paintings became Kang’s first anonymous portraits, turning the body into a rhythm of folds, seams, and reflections: quiet abstractions that reveal his fascination with the everyday as a site of intimacy.

This process of cropping and re-framing became central to his later Couple and Nude series. For the Couple paintings, begun after 2016, Kang Seok Ho focused on compositions of two figures sharing a single frame, zooming into moments of touch and proximity in photographs drawn from social media or film stills. What might appear to mark a turn toward narrative was, for him, a continuation of his formal and material concerns—now directed toward the tension and harmony between forms sharing a pictorial surface: clasped hands, entwined arms, and faces pressed together. His interest lay not in depicting two individuals, but in capturing the fleeting moments of convergence or intimacy between them.

These investigations of the body as landscape evolved into the Nude series, where the artist magnified his gaze still further, turning his attention to the texture, creases, and folds of skin. Cropped tightly on the décolletage, navel, or buttocks, these paintings subvert the conventions of the nude, lingering between disclosure and restraint. In one painting, a few strands of ebony hair splay across a softly dappled expanse of skin; in others, peaches and grapes—perhaps a nod to nudes in Western art—partially obscure the body, leaving the viewer uncertain of what is being revealed or withheld. Viewers often interpreted these works as erotic, a reading Kang Seok Ho resisted.

In the late 2010s, Kang Seok Ho pushed the compositions of the Couple paintings further inward, enlarging his canvases to focus on the eyes of two individuals. In some, two faces adjoin edge to edge, their shared boundary forming a seam; in others, one face passes another, half-visible, half-withheld. Eventually, the faces nearly overlap, merging into a single eye-like form—a meeting point of color and light akin to a solar eclipse. In his final group of Nude paintings, created for a 2021 exhibition shortly before his death, Kang Seok Ho concentrated his gaze on the belly button—the body’s physical and metaphorical center. Perhaps his most intimate works, these paintings anchor folds and crevices of skin within expanses of color that verge on abstraction.

The exhibition’s title, Hold Still, refers to Kang’s working process of selecting an image and re-framing it to fit the proportions of his canvas. This became a way of reconstructing chance, visually compelling moments encountered amid the sensory excess of contemporary life and translating these images from the immediacy of photography to the slower temporality of paint. The images, held still by the artist’s intention, become his paintings—and in turn, invite viewers to look with the same attentiveness.

 

Although Kang’s work has only recently begun to receive wider international recognition, his influence within Korea’s painting community was deeply felt during his lifetime. As an artist, curator, and writer, he helped shape the discourse on contemporary art, organizing group exhibitions such as Good Form (Insa Art Space, 2005), Manner in Korean Paintings (Hite Collection, 2012), and When Words Fail (Hite Collection, 2016). His writings on everyday experiences—plainspoken yet lyrical—echoed the tone of his paintings, reflecting an ongoing search for clarity that always left space for uncertainty.

 

Kang’s passing in 2021 left his inquiries open-ended. Yet in his Couple and Nude paintings—where forms meet, merge, or drift apart—he captured something of the fragility of connection itself. His paintings do not seek to resolve the tension between self and other, painter and viewer, figure and ground; rather, they hold that tension quietly, discovering comfort in the unsettled.

Artist Kang Seok Ho

Kang Seok Ho received his Bachelor of Fine Art in sculpture at Seoul National University, then left for Germany to study with Jan Dibbets (b. 1941) at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where he received his Masters of Fine Art in painting. After winning the UBS Art Award in Basel, Switzerland in 2000, he returned to Korea and won the Seoknam Art Prize (Seoul, Korea) in 2004, and he was the selected artist for Young Korean Artists 2008: I AM AN ARTIST by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art. From 2003 to 2020, he held 16 solo exhibitions at Insa Art Space, Kumho Museum of Art, and Mimesis Art Museum. Beyond his artistic practice, Kang Seok Ho was also active as a curator, organizing group exhibitions featuring his peers and younger artists, as well as design shows inspired by his personal passion for modern European and American design. Exhibitions curated by Kang include Good Form (Insa Art Space, 2005), Manner in Korean Paintings (Hite Collection, 2012), When Words Fail (Hite Collection, 2016), and Bauhaus and Modern Life (Kumho Museum of Art, 2019). Not separating his daily life and art, he led meetings to interact with fellow artists on the subjects of painting, books, music, hiking, and fishing. He taught as a professor at Seoul National University of Science and Technology from 2018 to 2021, and his first retrospective, seok ho kang: Three Minute Delight (2022-2023) was held at the Seoul Museum of Art in the first year after his untimely death in 2021. His debut solo exhibition with Tina Kim Gallery was held in 2023.

TINA KIM GALLERY 

525 West 21st Street, New York, NY 10011

tinakimgallery.com

Lee Seung Jio @ Tina Kim Gallery, NYC - "Nucleus in Resonance" Exhibition of work by a leading figure in postwar Korean geometric abstraction

Lee Seung Jio: Nucleus in Resonance

Tina Kim Gallery, New York

September 18 - November 1, 2025

Tina Kim Gallery presents Lee Seung Jio: Nucleus in Resonance. Marking the gallery’s second solo exhibition of LEE SEUNG JIO (1941–1990), a leading figure in postwar Korean geometric abstraction, this presentation surveys Lee’s defining Nucleus series, which he explored consistently from the late 1960s to his final decade. For Lee, the nucleus was more than a formal motif; it functioned as a central point of perception, where energy, rhythm, and sensory experience came together.

 “I began this [painting] after the launch of the Apollo spacecraft opened my eyes to the spatiality of the universe. It feels like the most fitting way to express the era I live in, so I’ve kept working on it ever since.”[1]

During Korea’s rapid industrialization and urban expansion in the 1960s, Lee turned to a single, enduring motif: the cylindrical pipe form. Lee’s pipes are both abstract and figurative, existing as two-dimensional planes and three-dimensional forms. Although often referred to as the “master of pipes,” Lee once noted that he neither sought nor rejected the label. For him, the repeated cylindrical form was never intended to represent any symbolic object; rather, it served to expose the illusions inherent in visual perception and to question the premise of figurative representation. Through this process, Lee aimed to depict a sensuous realm stripped of symbolic meaning—a world of “sheer particles,” as he described it.

As a founding member of the groups ORIGIN (1962–) and AG (Korean Avant-Garde Association, 1969–1975), Lee helped establish the theoretical and methodological foundations of postwar Korean art. Even though his work was often associated with movements such as Mono-ha, Minimalism, and Dansaekhwa at the time, Lee developed a distinct visual language characterized by precision, restraint, and structural clarity. As Joan Kee has observed, Lee’s work reveals how he critically engaged with contemporary abstraction—a mode in which socio-historical conditions are transformed into rigorous compositional structures.[2]

The earliest work in the exhibition, Nucleus 10 (1968), was first shown at the 12th Contemporary Art Exhibit at Gyeongbokgung Palace Museum. The painting marks the beginning of Lee’s signature motif—a tubular form. This vocabulary finds fuller articulation in Nucleus 74-9 (1968–1974), in which the pipe motif becomes the organizing framework of the entire composition. To achieve the illusion of metallic density, Lee applied oil paint with a flat brush loaded with light and dark tones at either end, then meticulously sanded the surface—burnishing the paint to heighten its reflectivity and optical depth. Featured in Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s–1970s—co-organized by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea and the Guggenheim Museum—the work affirms Lee’s growing significance within Korean modernism.

Lee continued to experiment with iterations of the Nucleus and develop his formal vocabulary throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Nucleus 73-18 (1973) and Nucleus 74-07 (1974) demonstrate his continued inquiry into the nature of perception, while reflecting a more subtle visual language grounded in the distilled and process-driven aesthetics of the time. Works from the 1980s—represented here by Nucleus 88-10 (1988), Nucleus 86-71 (1986), and the monumental Nucleus 87-99 (1987)—demonstrate his sustained pursuit of structural rigor, while simultaneously drawing the viewer into contemplative, illusionistic spaces that transcend the material surface of the canvas.

The exhibition concludes with the first U.S. presentation of Lee’s black paintings, including Nucleus 78-23, 78-24, 78-25 and 78-26 (all 1978). For Lee, black was not merely a color but a fundamental space of silence, stillness, and emptiness—where all elements were reduced to their origin. In Lee’s vocabulary, the nucleus signified not only the structural core of the image but a condensed field of visual and sensory perception. These works represent the culmination of his decades-long exploration of abstraction, characterized by their emphasis on materiality and process. Lee’s black paintings draw the viewer into a contemplative space where being and form quietly converge, embodying his pursuit of abstraction’s essential condition. 

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[1] Lee Seung Jio, “Presenting the Nucleus Series with Cold Lines and Blazes of Fire,” interview with Maeil Business Newspaper, October 24, 1984.

[2] Joan Kee, “Force Fields,” in Lee Seung Jio: Advancing Columns (Seoul: National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, 2020), 14-25.

TINA KIM GALLERY

525 West 21st Street, New York, NY 10011

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The Making of Modern Korean Art: The Letters of Kim Tschang-Yeul, Kim Whanki, Lee Ufan, and Park Seo-Bo, 1961–1982 @ Tina Kim Gallery, New York

The Making of Modern Korean Art 

The Letters of Kim Tschang-Yeul, Kim Whanki, Lee Ufan, and Park Seo-Bo, 1961–1982

Tina Kim Gallery, New York

May 5 - June 21, 2025

Tina Kim Gallery presents The Making of Modern Korean Art: The Letters of Kim Tschang-Yeul, Kim Whanki, Lee Ufan, and Park Seo-Bo, 1961–1982. Organized in conjunction with the launch of a landmark new publication of the same title, the exhibition brings to life the personal and intellectual exchanges between four pioneering artists who shaped the trajectory of modern Korean art during the transformative decades following the Korean War. Through the presentation of significant paintings made by all four artists during this period, as well as archival materials, photography, and ephemera, the exhibition will make manifest the artistic dialogues and debates that guided the global emergence of Korean modern art.

In the aftermath of the Korean War (1950–53), amid political upheaval and limited institutional support, Korean artists faced the urgent challenge of redefining their cultural landscape and articulating their collective trauma and existential dislocation. Many turned to abstraction as a means of forging a distinctly Korean modernity, one that resisted both Western ideologies and inherited aesthetic traditions. Among Korea’s earliest abstractionists, Kim Whanki evolved from semi-abstracted depictions of moon jars and plum blossoms to the sublime all-over dot paintings of his New York period, blending a Korean sensibility with global avant-garde influences. Park Seo-Bo and Kim Tschang-Yeul, deeply influenced by European Informel, produced early works characterized by thick impasto, raw surfaces, and material experimentation. This shared language laid the foundation for their later iconic series: Kim Tschang-Yeul turned to the meditative precision of his Waterdrop series, reflecting Taoist principles of ego dissolution; while Park Seo-Bo developed his Ecriture series, defined by its monochromatic palette and a rigorous focus on repetition, process, and discipline. Lee Ufan, initially a key figure in the Mono-ha movement in Japan, transitioned in the early 1970s to his From Point and From Line series, merging material restraint with philosophical inquiry in simple, deliberate brush strokes that evoke Eastern calligraphy. By the mid-1970s, each artist had developed a singular visual idiom: distinct yet unified by a shared ambition to advance Korean art on the global stage. Key works from these formative series will be featured in the forthcoming exhibition.

Though geographically dispersed, the four artists remained closely connected through a decades-long correspondence. In the absence of a robust cultural infrastructure in Korea, their letters became essential conduits for critical exchange, exhibition planning, and mutual support. Park Seo-Bo and Kim Tschang-Yeul, lifelong friends and collaborators, played a pivotal role in organizing the second Hyundae Fine Art Exhibition in 1957 and corresponded tirelessly to coordinate Korea’s participation in the 1961 Paris Biennale. Lee Ufan and Park Seo-Bo, who began exchanging letters after their joint inclusion in a 1968 group exhibition in Tokyo, became key mediators between the Korean and Japanese art scenes; and Kim Whanki, a generation older, served as a mentor figure, encouraging Kim Tschang-Yeul to apply for Rockefeller Fellowship funding that ultimately brought him to New York in 1965. From Seoul, Tokyo, Paris, and New York, the four artists exchanged ideas, critiques, and reflections on both the practical and philosophical challenges of working from the periphery of the global art world. Their letters not only offer an unprecedented window into their artistic development but also reveal a collective commitment to building a Korean modernism that could engage—on its own terms—with the broader narratives of postwar art.

The Making of Modern Korean Art foregrounds these correspondences—newly translated, previously unpublished, and reproduced at actual size—as critical primary documents in the story of Korean modernism. Published by Gregory R. Miller & Co., the book is co-edited by Yeon Shim Chung, Professor of Art History and Theory at Hongik University, and Doryun Chong, Artistic Director and Chief Curator of M+, Hong Kong, and features a contribution by Kyung An, Curator of Asian Art at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Beyond the letters, the volume marks a major contribution to the field as a comprehensive English-language survey of Korean abstraction, spanning the period from the birth of Korean Informel to the formation of Dansaekhwa.

TINA KIM GALLERY

525 West 21st Street, New York, NY 10011

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Artist Suki Seokyeong Kang @ Tina Kim Gallery, New York

Suki Seokyeong Kang

Tina Kim Gallery, New York

2 May - 15 June 2024

Tradition is about thinking about the present more deeply.*

—Suki Seokyeong Kang

Tina Kim Gallery presents Suki Seokyeong Kang, the gallery’s second solo exhibition of leading South Korean contemporary artist Suki Seokyeong Kang (b. 1977). Expanding on the themes that characterize Kang’s critically acclaimed multimedia practice, the exhibition includes works never before seen in New York, many of which were specifically created for her major 2023 solo exhibition, Suki Seokyeong Kang: Willow Drum Oriole, held at the Leeum Museum of Art, in Seoul (September 7 - December 31, 2023).

The theme of being present connects the diverse works in this exhibition. Kang’s practice centers on the exploration of tension, boundaries, and balance. Her paintings and sculptures negotiate a harmony between old and new, reinterpreting traditional art forms like Jeongganbo and Chunaengmu in contemporary contexts.1 References to the four seasons, works evoking sound and movement, and the balancing of near and far views create a sense of wholeness and inevitability, asking viewers to find peace and presence in the here and now. 

On view in the gallery are works from Kang’s celebrated series Jeong, Mat, Narrow Meadow, and Mora, as well as two new sculpture series, Mountain and Column. For each of these bodies of work, she has developed a distinct formal vocabulary that combines traditional techniques with specific materials to create dynamic forms inspired by Korean culture yet deeply engaged with contemporary social issues and art history. Rooted in her training as a traditional painter, Kang’s works explore how, despite our many differences, we remain connected. In focusing on how ideas of the past manifest today, Kang employs the traditional concept of “Jinkyung,” or “true-view,” painting, which seeks to represent the essence of the subject through the principle of shared symbolism. In this way, her work frames what she describes as “the beautiful moment of sharing time,” assisting us in being present in a space where “we can constantly reconcile imbalances and conflicts and achieve complete harmony with each other.”

* Quoted in Connie Butler, “The Subtle Smile: Suki Seokyeong Kang’s Sympathetic Object,” in Willow Drum Oriole (Seoul: Leeum Museum of Art, 2023). All quotes by the artist are from this exhibition catalogue. 

1 Jeongganbo is a type of musical notation dating back to the Joseon dynasty, in which the duration and pitch of sounds are notated within a square grid shaped like the character “Jeong” 

(井). Chunaengmu, or the Dance of the Spring Oriole, is a solo Korean court dance that originated during the later period of the Joseon dynasty.

TINA KIM GALLERY

525 West 21st Street, New York, NY 10011

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Artist Chung Seoyoung Exhibition @ Tina Kim Gallery, NYC - "With no Head nor Tail"

Chung Seoyoung

With no Head nor Tail

Tina Kim Gallery, New York 

March 21 - April 20, 2024

Tina Kim Gallery presents Chung Seoyoung (b. Seoul, 1964)’s With no Head nor Tail. This marks the artist’s second solo exhibion with the gallery since 2017. In a 1996 interview, shortly after Chung’s artistic career began, she described her work as the “reciprocal motion between the unreal and real, the abstract and concrete.”[1] This description, which diverges from our conventional understanding of sculpture, suggests that sculpture for Chung is an articulation of the negative spaces in between the beliefs and notions that we have come to recognize and categorize. With no Head nor Tail presents works from a transitional phase in Chung’s practice, re-examining the medium of sculpture from “all possible conditions of reference,”[2] including objects, time, space, text, sound, and the viewer’s body in motion.

Many of Chung’s motifs often depict moments where abstract concepts intersect with ephemeral forms, such as ghosts, waves, and fires. The title of this exhibition seeks to evoke with a touch of humor the essence of a ghost – its shape constantly shifting, unable to be pinned down through language. Included in With no Head nor Tail will be early works from the 1990s where Chung has utilized everyday objects, to drawings that bridge the blindspots in perception through language and imagery. Furthermore, works that are composed of and keenly bring out the subtle innate qualities of materials that elicit memories of a certain socio-economical moment in Korea and references such as flooring decals, plastic, plywood, artificial plants, furniture, retro typefaces, bronze, and ceramics, culminate in what Chung denotes as “sculptural moments.”

Road (1993) and Sink (2011) are representative of works that Chung has composed with ordinary, commonplace objects. Originally exhibited at the abandoned substation in Singen, Germany, as part of the group exhibition Symposion Umspannwerk in 1993, Road consists of plastic buckets placed on wheeled legs, containing wooden balls with intersecting roads drawn on them. As suggested by the wheels and the round wooden balls, Road becomes a form representing continuous space and time, while the bucket serves as a container for these elements in motion. Another work that contains an everyday item is Sink (2011), which debuted at Apple vs. Banana, the artist’s solo exhibition held in a defunct model house in Seoul in 2011. Sink encourages a re-evaluation of familiar consumer goods and an examination of their already “known” appearances as if they were a blank canvas. For Chung, objects do not merely serve the function of creating sculpture. But rather, she seeks to bring out what has yet to be said about them – opening up other passageways that differ from and go beyond accepted and superficial points of view.

This exhibition presents an opportunity to engage with recent works that reveal the artist’s long-standing investigation of the relationship between language and perception. Deep Sea and Thick Wall (2024) is a standing sculpture composed of white panels silkscreened with text that reads: “staring into the deep sea and a thick wall is the same? the.” The text itself is written in typography reminiscent of South Korean grade school art classes in the 70s and 80s – a time when students had to create posters as part of the state-mandated collective social education curriculum. It is not that Chung seeks to align a “deep sea” and a “thick wall” as being the same, but rather that through sharing in the “act of looking,” she is able to mediate and erase the perceived boundary between the two. Another series with a prominent use of language is the A4-sized ceramic drawings. Some of them feature simple drawings made with gold glaze, while others have Korean characters that Chung inscribed using glaze pencils while using a ruler. Residual traces of pigment smudged by the ruler appear on the white, matte surface of the porcelain, evoking transience and ephemerality. Therefore, the consonants, vowels, words, and phrases appear like remnants of form and sound. Echoing Chung’s maxim – “When the object is cumbersome due to scale, I let drawing do the work” – the materiality of language is in a sense, an abstract sculpture.

Some senses are stronger than that of sight. Chung’s most recent work Red (2024) began with the artist’s vivid memory of encountering writer Charlotte Brontë’s dress displayed at the Morgan Library in New York. To be conceived as having belonged to a living person, the dress seemed too peculiar in size, thereby the experience generated a new relationship between the subject of the dress and the artist's body. This strange encounter lingered within the artist, creating an intense urge “to make something from what I've seen and what I know, but at the same time, has no meaning.”

Let us now recall the title of Chung's most recent retrospective, What I Saw Today (Seoul Museum of Art, 2022), which at first may sound unremarkable and detached. But Chung's decision to use the word “today,” rather than “yesterday” or “back then,” is significant because her sculptures aim to go beyond merely describing or representing past experiences in the present.[3] Chung says, “For the past 4.5 billion years, the sun has visited us without fail, every single day of the year.”[4] By situating her work alongside the sunrise, Chung evokes the continual passing of time, while still calling to mind that each sunrise is a new and unique event, because there will always be only one “today.” Essential to Chung’s sculpture is this heterogenous understanding of temporality that allows for the experience of simultaneity through time’s cyclical nature, while acknowledging time’s linearity. Still pertinent in 2024, Chung’s works capture this fleeting convergence where the subjective and the objective come together in time and space.

[1] Lee Jong-soong, “Between What Can Be Said and What Cannot Be Said: Thoughts on the Recent Works of Chung Seoyoung,” Space, January 1996.

[2] Lee Hanbum, “Chung Seoyoung and about Chung Seoyoung,” manuscript presented at Language Activity, a public program in the occasion of exhibition Chung Seoyoung Solo Show (Audio Visual Pavilion, 2016).

[3] Jihan Jang, “Ghost, Object, Sculpture: The Sculptural Moment of Chung Seoyoung,” Chung Seoyoung: What I Saw Today (Milan: Skira, 2022).

[4] Excerpted from Chung Seoyoung, Continuity, 2020. Single-channel video installation, dimensions variable.

TINA KIM GALLERY

525 West 21st Street, New York, NY 10011

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Maia Ruth Lee @ Tina Kim Gallery, NYC - The skin of the earth is seamless

Maia Ruth Lee

The skin of the earth is seamless

Tina Kim Gallery, New York

April 6 – May 6, 2023

Tina Kim Gallery presents The skin of the earth is seamless, a solo exhibition of works by Busan-born (South-Korea), Colorado-based artist MAIA RUTH LEE (b. 1983). For her first exhibition with the gallery, Lee debuts a series of paintings, sculptures, and video, all developed over the course of the past year. These works expand on Lee’s Bondage Baggage series (2018-ongoing), born out of the artist’s longstanding concerns surrounding the physical, psychological, and emotional experiences of a diasporic migratory life. The works included in the exhibition speak to the potentiality of healing and transformation that could take place despite or rather, through mobility and rootlessness. Through abstraction, Lee’s work fluctuates between states of being settled and states of change.

All works presented in this exhibition stem from a material process that is at once tactile and painterly. The Bondage Baggage sculptures were originally developed in reference to the luggage seen on conveyor belts at the international airport in Kathmandu, where the artist spent her childhood. As objects that witness and endure limitations of physical borders, the parcels appear to the artist as containers of stories and ideas. Linen, clothing, and used materials are bunched together, covered with plastic, tarps, burlap or canvas, then meticulously fastened with rope-like cord in order to create the sculptures. The soft surfaces of these bundles often bulge and strain, evoking the fundamentals of containment and constraint, but also that of fortitude and resilience. Installed throughout the galleries, the physical qualities of these works evince notions of self-preservation, protection, and manifestation.

Some Bondage Baggage sculptures do not remain in these forms. The canvas layer of the sculptures is painted in ink and left to seep around and through the ropes. These ropes are then cut, allowing the “skin” of the sculptures to be unfurled, revealing Lee’s Bondage Baggage paintings. Summoning the appearance of leather or aging skin, each painting reveals track-like imprints that evidence the act of bondage performed on it previously. Although creases and traces are visible, they maintain an energetic, almost entropic charge. Often structured as burst-like compositions, the paintings seemingly radiate from an internal center outward. Describing these works as “vital embodiment of change, mutation, and growth,” the artist has conceptualized these paintings as visceral expressions of expansion and aliveness. These paintings stand in contrast to the second sculptural series on view: empty, shell-like “pods”  that are suspended and scattered within the gallery space. Made from the discarded ropes cut away from the body of the original Bondage Baggage sculptures, these works can be seen as the exoskeletal structure shed during the work’s metamorphosis. Remaining as fragile subjects, they bear only the vestiges of the items they once served to protect.

The exhibition’s title refers to a quote in writer Gloria Anzaldúa’s 1987 text “Borderlands/La Frontera”. Although Anzaldúa likens having a diasporic identity to having an open wound, she writes that “the skin of the earth is seamless, the sea cannot be fenced, el mar does not stop at borders.” In “The Letter”, a new video that Lee made for the exhibition, she stitches together footage of old family videos shot by her father in her rural hometown of Nepal. Subtitled with text from Lee’s personal letters written between 2020 through 2022, the seemingly mundane moments captured in the video provoke questions and concerns surrounding the home, family, spiritual inheritance, language, and translation. A tender and poignant portrait of one’s interior self, the exhibition centers migration as a generative, powerful force for creation.

MAIA RUTH LEE has held solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (CO), Francois Ghebaly Gallery (LA), and Jack Hanley Gallery (NY). Lee has participated in numerous group exhibitions including the Aspen Art Museum (CO), 2019 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, Helena Anrather Gallery, CANADA gallery, Studio Museum 127, Salon 94 in New York, and Overduin & Co. Gallery, and Roberts & Tilton Gallery in Los Angeles. Lee attended Hongik University in Seoul, and the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver, Canada. Lee was the recipient of the Gold Art Prize in 2021 and the Rema Hort Mann grant in 2017. Her work is held in the public collection at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

TINA KIM GALLERY

525 West 21st Street, New York, NY 10011

www.tinakimgallery.com

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Minoru Niizuma @ Tina Kim Gallery, NYC - Waterfall in Autumn Wind

Minoru Niizuma

Waterfall in Autumn Wind

Tina Kim Gallery, New York

November 10 — December 10, 2022

Minoru Niizuma

Windy Wind, 1969

Portuguese black granite, 120 x 22.2 x 28.6 cm

Courtesy of the artist’s estate and Tina Kim Gallery

Photo by Dario Lasagni

Tina Kim Gallery presents its first exhibition dedicated to the practice of Japanese-American sculptor and educator MINORU NIIZUMA (b. 1930, Tokyo; d. 1998, New York). Recognized for his abstract marble sculptures in the postwar period, Minoru Niizuma exhibited widely in the United States and Europe, and was an active organizer of public sculpture exhibitions across both continents. Although a lifelong artist and educator whose works entered multiple institutional and private collections, Minoru Niizuma’s legacy has rarely been acknowledged since his passing at the age of 67, in part due to a lack of formal representation. Marking the first attempt to introduce a deeper understanding of the artist’s practice, the exhibition brings together works from two key decades of his practice—the 1970s and 80s. In addition, on view are a range of rare archival material that contextualizes his efforts to promote broader cross-cultural understandings between the US, Europe, and Japan through his stone-carving symposiums, exhibitions, and public sculpture parks. Accompanying this exhibition will also be an illustrated exhibition catalog, featuring an extended introduction of the artist written by art historian and curator Reiko Tomii.

Born in Tokyo in 1930 and educated at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, Minoru Niizuma immigrated to New York in 1959 and joined the Brooklyn Museum Art School as an instructor in 1964. Upon establishing his studio practice in New York, Minoru Niizuma attained the space needed to develop larger-scale sculptures; soon after, his work was included in both the 1966 and 1968 Whitney Annuals, as well as a landmark survey of Japanese Art that traveled through five institutions across the US, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Throughout his life, Minoru Niizuma worked in series, focusing on refining and iterating a single form over the course of several years.

Although affiliated with the emerging artistic cluster that came to become known as “Minimalism,” Minoru Niizuma’s artistic development remained intrinsically indebted to the properties of his oft-chosen mediums: marble and granite. Beginning from the 1970s and 80s onwards, Minoru Niizuma increasingly chose to execute his works in ways that revealed—rather than obviated—the natural appearance of stone, reacting against the prevailing emphasis on industrial material and processes dominating sculptural practice during that time. In contrast with his earlier work from the 1960s, which are often characterized by highly polished surfaces and geometric forms, the works included in the exhibition bear evidence of the artist’s intention to restrain his own hand. As exemplified by works such as Windy Wind (c.1970s), the surfaces of the sculptures are marked by grooves, crags, and furrows. Yet, the rough-hewn appearance of Minoru Niizuma’s works is contrasted with the organic, fluid forms that the artist employed. Harboring a love of mountain climbing, many of the forms of Minoru Niizuma’s sculptures are inspired by his own encounters with natural environments, which he alludes to in the title of each respective work.

Apart from key works, the exhibition also includes select archival material that contextualizes Minoru Niizuma’s efforts to promote artistic exchange during these key decades. Minoru Niizuma established significant relationships with artists and art professionals, including Isamu Noguchi, George Segal, and Yoko Ono, amongst others. In addition, he played an integral role in organizing exhibitions that introduced Japanese sculptors to New York in various venues, including the Sculpture Center. Earlier in 1971, Minoru Niizuma had also organized a symposium of stone sculpture in New York City, commissioning new works from artists and displaying them in outdoor, public sites across the city. Over the course of the next two decades, Minoru Niizuma would go on to organize and participate in multiple “stone symposiums” across various locations including Vermont, Portugal, Ireland, and Austria. Often, he and other participants would draw on the local marble and granite quarries to create new works that were then exhibited to the public. In the 1980s, Minoru Niizuma began traveling to Portugal extensively because of the immense array of marble and stone available, eventually resulting in a partnership with Portuguese President Mario Soares to build artistic exchange between Portugal and Japan. Today, many of Minoru Niizuma’s large-scale public sculptures can still be seen throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan. They reflect his own artistic development but also stand as a testament to his passion for promoting stone carving across these continents.

Arata Niizuma and the Estate of Minoru Niizuma collaborated on this exhibition.

TINA KIM GALLERY

525 West 21st Street, New York, NY 10011

www.tinakimgallery.com

Leo Amino, Minoru Niizuma, John Pai @ Tina Kim Gallery, NYC - The Unseen Professors - Curated by John Yau

The Unseen Professors

Leo Amino (1911-1989), Minoru Niizuma (1930-1998), John Pai (b. 1937)

Tina Kim Gallery, New York

November 18, 2021 – January 29, 2022

                                        

Leo Amino (1911 –1989)

Refractional #184, 1983

Polyester resin

© The Estate of Leo Amino, Courtesy of Tina Kim Gallery

Minoru Niizuma

Crenel, 1975 

Verona red marble, 39 x 19 x 19 inches, 99.1 x 48.3 x 48.3 cm. 

© The Estate of Minoru Niizuma, Courtesy of Tina Kim Gallery

John Pai

Involution, 1974

40 x 40 x 40 inches, 101.6 x 101.6 x 101.6 cm.

© John Pai, Courtesy of Tina Kim Gallery

Curated by John Yau, the exhibition, The Unseen Professors: Leo Amino (1911-1989), Minoru Niizuma (1930-1998), John Pai (b. 1937), focuses on the sculptures of Leo Amino, Minoru Niizuma, and John Pai, three Asian artists who were born in Taiwan, Japan, and Korea between 1911 and 1937, and immigrated to America. Eventually, all of them moved to New York City, where they worked and taught for many years in leading institutions, such as Cooper Union, Pratt Institute, and Columbia University. In fact, despite belonging to different generations, their teaching careers overlapped for more than decade (1964-1977), during which time a generation of artists associated with Minimalism and site-specific art gained much of the art world’s attention. 

During the period in which they were teaching and exhibiting, both here and abroad, the following essays were published: “Specific Objects” (1965) by Donald Judd and “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” by Rosalind Krauss. Neither of them mentions a single sculptor of color at a time when there were almost no critics of color who could offer an alternative vision to their influential viewpoints. By gathering together a group of sculptures made of different materials (wood, polyester resin, marble, granite, and steel), this exhibition will demonstrate that there was a group of artists who had roots in other histories and philosophies than the one that was narrowly defined by Judd and Krauss.

It is high time we place the oversights of Judd and Krauss in context. Between 1947 and ’62, Amino, who had taught at Black Mountain College (Summer of 1946 and ’50) and was the first American sculptor to work with polyester resin (plastic) after World War II, showed in all but two Whitney Annuals between 1947 and ’62. Niizuma and Judd had work in the Whitney Annual of 1966 and Niizuma’s work was also shown in the Whitney Annual two years later (1968), in which Judd’s work was not included. Although Niizuma was included in these two exhibitions, none of his sculptures entered the museum’s collection. Pai’s work is not in the museum collection, while Amino has one work. The underrepresentation of these three sculptors, all of whom were actively working and teaching for many years in New York, is one impetus of the exhibition. The larger goal is to introduce a new generation of viewers to three distinguished Asian American sculptors working in different mediums, and employing different processes, as they followed their own trajectory and attained something particular and unique in their work.

By reexamining this period through significant works by Amino, Niizuma, and Pai, The Unseen Professors: Leo Amino (1911-1989), Minoru Niizuma (1930-1998), John Pai (b. 1937) highlights the significant accomplishment of three independent Asian-born artists who never were associated with a mainstream movement or style. Equally important is that the work and material choices of these Asian-American artists have almost nothing in common with each other. Each rigorously pursued their own trajectory and never attempted to become part of the currents dominating the New York art world at that time.  This refusal to work in an approved style may have been due to the realization that they would always be outsiders or outliers, no matter what they did.

LEO AMINO - BIOGRAPHY

Leo Amino was born in 1911 in the then-Japanese colony of Taiwan, before moving to Tokyo at a young age. Immigrating to the US in 1929 as a 17 year old, he attended San Mateo Junior College in California before crossing the country to New York, where he briefly attended New York University. Amino eventually studied direct carving with Chaim Gross at the American Artist’s School in 1937, stepping onto a national artistic stage through his inclusion alongside Isamu Noguchi at the 1939 World Fair in New York. 1939 also marked the first hostilities of World War II, during which Amino was made to work as a translator for the US Navy, beginning his first forays into plastics shortly after the military declassified polyester resin. Their transparent, malleable qualities inspired his forays into acrylic sculpture, making him one of the earliest artists in the US to work with plastics, a practice he continued through the rest of his life. 

Invited to teach at Black Mountain College by Josef Albers for two summers in 1946 and 1950, Leo Amino flourished as an educator and artist. He was included 13 times over 15 years in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Annual exhibition from 1947 - 1962, and was featured in the decade defining 1950 Carvers-Modelers-Welders at The Museum of Modern Art, as well as the 1951 American Sculpture at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Amino went on to teach at the Cooper Union from 1952 to 1977, mentoring generations of artists, including Jack Whitten. He passed away in 1989.

 

MINORU NIIZUMA - BIOGRAPHY

Born 1930 in Tokyo, Japan, Minoru Niizuma immigrated to the United States in the postwar period, following his education at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, and his subsequent local success exhibiting with the Modern Art Association in Tokyo. Settling in New York in 1959, Niizuma joined the Brooklyn Museum Art School in 1964 as a teacher, while simultaneously stepping deep into the emerging artistic cluster that came to be affiliated with the term “Minimalism.” Throughout his life, Minoru Niizuma worked in series, mostly focusing on refining and iterating a single form over the course of several years. With his carved stone works, sitting on the edge of symbolic figuration with their distinctive juxtapositions of smooth and rugged texture, Minoru Niizuma was included in shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Guggenheim. Minoru Niizuma also privileged other means of exposing the public to his works, his works prized in both institutional and commercial sculpture gardens. As a result, he began to place works in museum collections including the Hirshhorn Museum, the Guggenheim, SFMOMA and the Museum of Modern Art. 

Following his six years at the Brooklyn Museum, Minoru Niizuma was named an adjunct professor at Columbia University, where he taught from 1972 through 1984. In the early 80’s, he began a pivot that would carry him into the last 20 years of his life and work, when he traveled to Portugal as part of the Evora Symposium. The immense array of marble and stone available in the European nation  brought Minoru Niizuma back time and time again, eventually resulting in a partnership with Portuguese President Mario Soares to build artistic exchange between Portugal and Japan. Minoru Niizuma passed away in 1998. 

JOHN PAI - BIOGRAPHY

John Pai’s childhood was defined by constant migration between places, his parents moving back and forth to South Korea over the course of World War II and the Korean War. Born in Seoul in 1937, Pai immigrated to the U.S. at age 11, though his parents returned to Korea shortly after. He was marked as an artistic talent early on, from his first solo exhibition at age of 15 at the Oglebay Institute in Wheeling, West Virginia, to his rapid rise as the youngest ever professor at the Pratt Institute. 

John Pai ascended to this latter honor in the midst of studying for his MFA in Sculpture at Pratt, just after completing his BFA in Industrial Design there in 1962. Across his undergraduate and graduate work, he simultaneously served as assistant to the Constructivism-adjacent sculptor Theodore Roszak. By 1965, he was named the Undergraduate Chair of Pratt’s Sculpture Department. John Pai proved a talented educator, holding various chair positions at Pratt until 1972, when he shifted into a standard professorship in order to focus on his own artistic practice. While simultaneously nurturing generations of sculptors and fostering the burgeoning Korean artistic community in New York, John Pai found success exhibiting his oftentimes unfolding, geometric sculptures across Korea. He continued to teach at Pratt until 2000. 

Recently, John Pai has shown at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea. He resides in Fairfield, Connecticut. 

 

JOHN YAU  - BIOGRAPHY

John Yau is a poet, fiction writer, art critic, publisher, and curator. Known for his attentiveness to visual culture and linguistic surface, he has published widely. His most recent book of poems is Genghis Chan on Drums (Omnidawn, 2021). Recent monographs include Liu Xiaodong (Lund Humphries, 2021), Thomas Nozkowski (Lund Humphries, 2017) and Catherine Murphy (Rizzoli, 2016). In 1999, he founded Black Square Editions, a small press devoted to poetry, fiction, translation, and criticism. His reviews appear regularly in the online journal Hyperallergic. In 2020, he received the Rabkin Prize for his art criticism.

John Yau recently finished a monograph on Joe Brainard, which Rizzoli will publish in the fall of 2022. His next project is a monograph on John Pai for Rizzoli.

TINA KIM GALLERY

525 W 21st Street, New York, NY 10011

www.tinakimgallery.com

Kim Tschang-Yeul @ Tina Kim Gallery, NYC - The Stillness of Water

Kim Tschang-Yeul 

The Stillness of Water 

Tina Kim Gallery, New York 

September 9 - October 16, 2021 

Kim Tschang-Yeul (1929-2021)

Waterdrops, 1984

Oil, india ink, and acrylic on canvas

14.96 x 21.65 inches / 38 x 55 cm

Image courtesy of the artist’s estate and Tina Kim Gallery.

Photo © Hyunjung Rhee

Tina Kim Gallery presents its second solo exhibition of KIM TSCHANG-YEUL (1929-2021), The Stillness of Water. The exhibition focuses on Kim’s different modes of forms and media through the artist’s experimental paintings that were mostly produced between the 1980s and 1990s. In 2019, the gallery presented Kim’s first solo exhibition with works from the 1960s to 1980s. This 2021 exhibition continues to follow his work chronologically, engaging with sides of Kim which have yet to be fully investigated and digging deeper into the nuances of his practice. The exhibition carefully examines the evolution of the artist’s signature motif: the drop of water.

Kim Tschang-Yeul is one of the first generation of modern artists, who underwent the turmoil of postcolonial liberation and the Korean War. Born in Maengsan in North Korea, Kim spent his youth learning calligraphy from his grandfather and studying a series of world art collections that his uncle sent him from Japan. After studying painting at the Seoul National University, Kim became a leading member of the Korean avant-garde and co-founded the Modern Artists’ Association (later renamed Actuel in 1962) in 1958. During this time, Kim encountered Western art movements, such as the European Art Informel, through the limited information about art coming from Japan. Reinterpreting such trends, Kim and his counterparts took on radical practices and adopted the Korean Informel movement. As an avid reader, Kim was also deeply interested in literature and philosophy, in which he embraced the ideas of Taoism and Zen Buddhism. From 1965 to 1969, Kim studied in New York where Pop Art and Abstract Expressionism prevailed and began his earliest experimentation with globular abstract forms. Ultimately settling in Paris in 1969, Kim created a cultural bridge between the Korean and European art world, often hosting his native counterparts including the Dansaekhwa masters, Park Seo-Bo, Lee Ufan, and Chung Sang-Hwa.

Kim Tschang-Yeul has mentioned, “Paris is different from New York […] Here various trends coexist. The ambiance in Paris gave me the strength to show my work.” With his sensibility of East Asian roots and exposure to influences of the French Informel, Pop Art and Abstract Expressionism from New York, and Surrealism and Dadaism from Paris, Kim began producing opaque, phlegmatic forms that appear to ooze out through the canvas plane in 1971. Navigating between different modes of transcontinental art movements that he gleaned from home and abroad, Kim unveiled his first waterdrop work, Événement de la nuit (1972), the following year, at Salon de Mai in Paris, France.

Since then, Kim has devoted his life-long career to depicting the drop of water, allowing him to confront and absolve his ego. Such an idea of removing his ego is very close to Taoism and Zen Buddhism, for Kim has often credited the discovery of the water drop partly to those influences. Lifelike yet mystical, each motif embodies an abdication of the self. It also mirrors the artist’s memories of war and acts of meditation. As Kim comments, “To paint water drops is to erase all memories, all evils, and the anguish [to be] destroyed with water.”

Although Kim’s oeuvre may be defined by the water drop, the iconic imagery is not a singular aesthetic decision, but a continuous paradigm leveraged over time in a plethora of outcomes. Kim mastered airbrush techniques to achieve a level of control he needed in visualizing the motif on raw canvas. In consequence, the trompe l’oeil fixes the aqueous orbs through his manipulation of light and surface. Still, Kim purposely avoided depicting his drops as hyper-realistic, which naturally led him to find new canvas supports such as jute, sand, wood, and newspaper. Thus new dialogues between the drops of water, backgrounds, and materiality fortified different experimental approaches for the artist.

1979 can be considered a turning point for Kim Tschang-Yeul, as he began transitioning away from utilizing strictly airbrush techniques. For Kim, the initial purpose of using the airbrush was twofold: to remove himself from the canvas while obtaining mechanistic water drops. Yet he felt the urge to achieve a stronger adherence between his iconic motif and the screen. As if to decisively integrate his presence on the canvas surface, he began incorporating paintbrush work to engender the pictorial formativeness of the motif itself. Beginning in the 1980s and onward, the water drops became fuller and more diverse in their forms, scales, projections, and compositions, with blots appearing more abundantly. In the work Waterdrops (1983), the duplicated droplets, which are depicted in a demarcated background, protrude out of each section with their translucency rendered in a vivid contrast of light and shadow. The images of stains gently denote the artist’s intensified touch and calligraphic strokes; each element in the work demonstrates notions beyond simple representations of water drops.

Kim Tschang-Yeul further incorporates new elements traditionally unseen in his practice as evident in Waterdrops (1995), in which a flat patch of black paint disrupts the trompe l’oeil. He would also introduce a thick cloud of colorful pigments in the work Waterdrops (1996), their impasto weighing heavily on the upper left corner of the canvas. In a diagonal yet balanced composition, glistening water droplets are sitting at the other pole of the surface. Often incorporating his repeated motif of the Thousand Character Classic that profoundly resonates both his childhood memories and his Taoist philosophy, Kim persisted in greater variety in relation to his signature motif, while still acknowledging insurmountable barriers of a two-dimensional painting. Yet such experimentations delineate a complex confluence of his worldly enlightenment and physicality, which are crystallized into drops of water in perpetual stillness. In Kim’s words, “Painting for me, is to show something different, something that is made by hand, and manages to move people. But it is also intellectual play and an act of meditation and prayer.”

It is an honor and a privilege to exhibit the work of Kim Tschang-Yeul, and Tina Kim Gallery would like to commemorate his legacy by presenting a holistic vision of Kim’s discipline. His water drops, the depths and waves of his practice and career, define the highest qualities one can achieve through artistry.

Following this exhibition, a monograph on Kim Tschang-Yeul will be designed by Cecil studio and published by Gregory R Miller & Co., which will feature texts by art critic John Yau and Yeon Shim Chung, Professor of Art History at Hongik University in Korea.

ABOUT KIM TSCHANG-YEUL

Kim Tschang-Yeul was born in Maengsan, Korea in 1929 and graduated from the College of Fine Art, Seoul National University in 1950. Kim co-founded the Modern Artists’ Association—later renamed as Actuel—in 1958. As one of the first generation of modernist painters, Kim participated in the Paris Biennale in 1961 and the São Paulo Biennale in 1965. In 1996, Kim was bestowed with the French Order of Arts and Letters followed by the National Order of Cultural Merits of Korea in 2012. The artist participated major international group exhibitions such as Korean Contemporary Painting Exhibition, Paris, France (1971); Salon de Mai, Paris, France (1972-76); Korea: Facet of Contemporary Art, Tokyo Central Museum, Tokyo, Japan (1977); and Korean Drawing Now, The Brooklyn Museum, New York, USA (1981). Kim’s significant retrospectives were held at the Gwangju Museum of Art, Korea (2014); National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung, Taiwan (2012); National Museum of China, Beijing (2005); and Jeu de Paume National Gallery, Paris, France (2004). In honor of the artist, Kim Tschang-Yeul Museum was founded in 2016 in Jeju, Korea, in which the museum has showcased a number of exhibitions including Traces of Existence (2016), Récurrence (2018), and currently, Dreaming Water Drops (2021). His works can be found among the collections of numerous institutions including the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea; Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Korea; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art, Japan; National Museum of Modern Art, Japan; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, USA; and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, USA.

TINA KIM GALLERY

525 W 21st Street, New York, NY 10011

www.tinakimgallery.com

Ha Chong-Hyun @ Tina Kim Gallery, NYC - Return to Color

Ha Chong-Hyun: Return to Color 

Tina Kim Gallery, New York 

Through June 30, 2021 

“An artist should constantly grapple with color. And I thought I would be able to finally complete the puzzle of my art when I fill in the missing color.” – Ha Chong-Hyun 

Tina Kim Gallery presents Return to Color, a solo exhibition of works by HA CHONG-HYUN (b. 1935), one of the leading members of the Dansaekhwa movement. Marking his third solo presentation with the gallery, the exhibition surveys the last decade of the artist’s practice with new polychromatic works that illuminate a return to color as well as a departure from his foundational, monochromatic Conjunction series first developed in the 1970s. This revitalized body of work is exhibited alongside selections from the artist’s Post-Conjunction series from 2011. Shown together, the exhibition examines the artist’s relationship with color, and investigate the philosophy behind the pivotal transitions in Ha’s practice. 

Ha Chong-Hyun began his Conjunction series in the 1970s and has developed the techniques into a signature style. The word “Conjunction” denotes the physical connection between two significant elements of his practice, his methods and his materials, and how the two are ‘conjoined.’ He started to use burlap in replacement of the more traditional canvas popular after the Korean War. It allows him to approach each painting from the reverse, pushing thick paint through the loose weave. The oil paint then emerges from the front, creating a texture that has become iconic to Ha’s practice.

While Ha is predominantly known for his monochrome paintings, this exhibition aims to bring forth a fresh perspective on Ha’s oeuvre, by presenting his Post-Conjunction series that illuminates a fuller, well-rounded discourse on Ha’s practice. In this series, Ha no longer limits himself to his usual earth-tone color palette. Rather, he opens himself up to a more diverse range of colors, building off of his earlier practice back in the 1960s during his tenure as a leader of the ‘A.G’. (Korean Avant-Garde Association), in which he would introduce the latest art trends to Korean counterparts. During this time, he engaged with abstraction and incorporated ‘Obangsaek,’ the color scheme of the Korean traditional colors of white, black, blue, yellow, and red. While his typical use of muted tones heavily involves the Dansaekhwa movement, a silent protest against the political establishment, his earlier works reflect much more vibrant, even, painterly gestures. Ha would also explore unconventional materials such as barbed wires, newspaper, and plaster, as a direct response to the situation of post-war Korea. Integrating everyday objects into his works, he challenged the traditional notion of painting and blurred the boundaries between painting, sculpture, and performance.

In each Post-Conjunction work, colorful oil pigments seep through each canvas consisting of multiple panels. Before the oozed oil paints would fully dry out, Ha would make labor-intensive marks directly on them in diagonal directions. The canvases themselves are elaborately formed with each wooden panel, which is sealed with cotton cloth and then painted with colorful gradations, connecting one to the other. Here, the artist explores and works with multiple sides of the canvas surface, pursuing his idea of painting as an object ever since the late 1960s. Thus, his practice in this series not only demonstrates the tension between two and three-dimensional forms, but also intensifies Ha’s continuous investigation of materiality and tactility. He combines spirited elements of color from his early work with the gradient, canvas breaking techniques of Conjunction, becoming whole in his totality of expression. Ha finally breaks the threshold of politics and personal, and expresses himself to the fullest without restraints of color, form, and purpose.

Essentially, Ha’s development of Post-Conjunction series further equipped him to expand his vibrant color scheme and painting method to his most recent Conjunction series, in which he applies layers of thick impasto marks that are further highlighted in gradations of paints mixed with white. His intensified yet loose painterly strokes amplify a more tactile appearance of each work amid its visceral surface, connoting Ha’s foremost interest in the pure act of painting. As evident in each new Conjunction series, the works have evolved richer and more diverse in its shades and forms. Still, each work reflects consistent formal qualities through Ha’s vigorous self-reference and profound contemplation on new challenges intertwined. Harkening back to his early practice from the late 1960s and the 1970s in which he would incorporate bright yet natural colors and experiment with space, both Post-Conjunction and new Conjunction series can be measured as the extension of his dynamic, ongoing quest for paintings’ myriad potentials.

HA CHONG-HYUN

Ha Chong-Hyun has lived and worked in Seoul since graduating from Hongik University in 1959. Awarded an honorary doctorate degree, he served as the Dean of the Fine Arts College from 1990 to 1994. From 2001 to 2006, Ha was the Director of the Seoul Museum of Art. Ha has had major solo exhibitions at Mudima Foundation of Contemporary Art, Milan (2003), Gyeongnam Art Museum, Changwon (2004), National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Gwacheon (2012), and Daejeon Museum of Art, South Korea (2020). In addition, he represented South Korea in major international art exhibitions such as Paris Biennale in 1961; São Paolo Art Biennale in 1967 and 1977; Venice Biennale in 1995; and Prague Biennale in 2009. He was also included in a historical exhibition in Venice, the Dansaekhwa Collateral Event of the 56th International Art Exhibition-La Biennale di Venezia (2015), as well as When Process Becomes Form: Dansaekhwa and Korean Abstraction with the Boghossian Foundation, Brussels (2016), and Korean Abstract Art: Kim Whanki and Dansaekhwa at Powerlong, Shanghai (2018). Ha Chong-Hyun’s works are held in public collections of prominent institutions, such as Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; M+ Museum, Hong Kong; National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea; and Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul.

TINA KIM GALLERY

525 West 21st Street, New York, NY 10011

www.tinakimgallery.com

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