A critical meditation on Chung Sang-Hwa: Seven Paintings
I The Korean born artist Chung Sang-Hwa’s solo exhibition, Seven Paintings at the Lévy Gorvy Gallery in London comprises a series of recently produced works, each measuring approximately 130 x 97cm, whose ‘white’ monochrome gridded surfaces have been realised through sustained additions, subtractions, re-applications and sgraffito-like scorings of acrylic paint on canvas. The resulting nuanced colour/tonal variations and ‘crunchy’ textures of Chung’s work are drawn out to some effect by the colour of the gallery’s walls, which have been painted an almost vanishingly contrasting light greyish-white. Despite their initially starkly monochromatic appearances and resistance to exact photographic reproduction on the Gallery’s website, when viewed at first hand Chung’s paintings reveal themselves, over time, as visually complex and aesthetically compelling. They are formally reminiscent of works by the internationally better known minimalist painters Robert Ryman 2 and Agnes Martin, 3 and in particular a series of grid paintings produced by the latter during the 1960s. However, when viewed in relation to the historical circumstances of painting in East-Asia their significances can be understood to diverge from those conventionally associated with western minimalism.
II Chung Sang-Hwa was born in Yeongdeok, Gyeongsangbuk-do, Korea in 1932 and graduated from the oil painting department of Seoul National University in 1956; after which he adopted the assemblage-like informel style of abstract painting—a localised variant of European taschisme—then prevalent among progressive artists in South Korea. Chung moved to Paris in 1967 before relocating to Kobe, Japan, where, as the pamphlet accompanying the exhibition indicates, ‘his distinctive process of the repeated application and removal of paint from the canvas was conceived and refined’.4
In 1992, Chung returned to South Korea, establishing a studio in Gyeonggi Province where... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline
Chung Sang-Hwa: Seven Paintings. Installation view, Lévy Gorvy, London, 2017.
