San Francisco to host Ha Chong-hyun retrospective — Korea Herald

The Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, United States, will present a retrospective of South Korean artist Ha Chong-hyun from September 25, spanning around six decades of his work. According to the curators, the exhibition “Ha Chong-hyun: Retrospective” will be the artist’s first museum retrospective outside South Korea, Korea Herald reports.

The exhibition does not reduce Ha’s work to Dansaekhwa, a movement often translated as monochrome painting. Park Seo-bo, Lee Ufan and Yun Hyong-keun are also associated with it. Museum director Lee So-young believes that this label narrows the perception of the artist’s body of work.

Experiments with materials

The exhibition will feature early works from the 1960s with thick layers of paint, threads and burned canvases. At the end of that decade, the artist created the “White Paper on Urban Planning” series with geometric grids and rays resembling road plans and urban intersections.

Among the politically charged works is “Counter-Phase,” in which a year’s set of newspapers is stacked together with blank sheets. As the publication notes, this was a hint at press censorship under authoritarian rule. Other works from that period include barbed wire and tangled springs.

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Conjunction and Post-Conjunction series

A central place in the exhibition is given to the long-running “Conjunction” series. For these works, Ha Chong-hyun pushed thick oil paint from the reverse side of coarse hemp canvas and then worked with the paint that emerged on the front surface. In the 1970s, he mostly left it without further intervention, while in subsequent decades he began pulling the paint into broad strokes and creating loop-like lines.

Around 2010, the artist began the “Post-Conjunction” series. In these works, he used wooden slats covered with canvas, mirrors, ink and oil paint. The final section of the exhibition will feature three new works, including “Post-Conjunction 26-503,” with colored stripes on a mirrored surface, and “Conjunction 26-14,” with a rich red field.

The exhibition will run at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco from September 25, 2026, to January 25, 2027.