The pioneering Korean contemporary artist Ha Chong-Hyun is the subject of a retrospective at the Asian Art Museum, his first major North American museum exhibition. Tracing Ha’s creative evolution over more than six decades, the exhibition features more than 50 paintings along with two new works completed as recently as 2025. The exhibition is guest-curated by eminent Seoul-based scholar and curator Sunjung Kim. San Francisco is also celebrating the 50th anniversary of its sister-city relationship with Seoul this year, and this exhibition helps amplify the impact of Korean art and culture in the Bay Area and beyond.
Imagination and innovation
Ha Chong-Hyun was born in 1935 during Japanese colonial rule and came of age in the aftermath of the Korean War. The uncertainty, upheaval, and cultural shifts present in his formative years are embedded in the structure and materials of Ha’s work — for example, he frequently used industrial burlap sacks, used to ship rice to South Korea after the war, as canvases.
Each touch, and each repetitive mark, is a trace of effort and resistance.
The White Paper on Urban Planning series began in the early 1960s when the artist began expanding the limits of conventional painting. Conventional composition becomes secondary to the physical exploration of thick layers of paint, bundles of thread embedded into surfaces, and passages scorched by flame. Ha’s visual language shifted as Korea underwent rapid industrialization. His series translates the expanding infrastructure of cities into grids and lines in works like White Paper on Urban Planning 68 (1968).
Bold grids painted in white and grey are intersected by brightly colored angular stripes reminiscent of a busy urban street. During this era, Ha became a founding member of the Korean Avant-Garde Association (AG). This creative time period was marked by political repression and artistic experimentation, evident in Counter-Phase (1971). Here, blank pages sit side-by-side with stacks of censored newspapers. The emptiness of the blank pages, piled high and set at equal height next to propagandized media, prompts us to consider our own freedoms, free-speech concerns, and what remains erased.
The ‘Conjunction’ series
Ha Chong-Hyun had a breakthrough in 1974 when he developed his Conjunction series. The series stands apart from other early-seventies minimalist paintings because of Ha’s “back pressure” method. Thick oil paint applied to the reverse of his burlap canvases breaks through the fabric’s coarse weave to the front, carrying the marks of pressure, resistance, and time. The series transforms the surface into something modular and spatial.
In Conjunction (1974) the back pressure method appears in an oil-on-paper work, complete with thick, oozing white paint bleeding through horizontal strips of paper and the paper taking on the stains of the oil. What remains is something that looks like it is in a state of becoming, something under construction or on its way to transforming into a different object entirely. The static association of a fixed art object is gone. Ha’s later Conjunction paintings continue to play with light, movement, and perception but add vivid primary colors, expanding beyond his earlier restrained palette. In Ha’s most recent works, charred materials and ash merge with paint in compositions animated by assertive colors. Conjunction 25-19 (2025) exemplifies thick paint layering, with blue fading into white, and an interest in repeating brushstrokes.
Beyond limits
The retrospective places Ha Chong-Hyun within a broader global context. The artist worked alongside figures such as Donald Judd and Agnes Martin, sharing an interest in repetition and materiality, but he diverges by embracing visible labor and imperfection. Western Minimalism usually sought industrial precision, whereas Ha’s surfaces retain signs of physical struggle and vulnerability. Each touch, and each repetitive mark, is a trace of effort and resistance.
Ha Chong-Hyun’s work is about the immediacy of the push-and-pull interaction between the creator’s hand and the surface. “Ha Chong-Hyun’s work reshapes how we understand abstraction — as a visceral experience, more than a purely visual language,” said Soyoung Lee, the Barbara Bass Bakar director and CEO of the Asian Art Museum. “This exhibition reveals an artist who expanded the possibilities of painting and embodied the realities of his time and place.” Ha Chong-Hyun: Retrospective reminds us of what painting can become when it is pushed — physically and conceptually — beyond its limits. It is also a reminder that the story of postwar abstraction is neither singular nor Western, but global.
