Chung Sang-hwa, a central determine in Korean fashionable artwork, died on January 28 after a protracted sickness. He was 93. The information was reported by the Korea Instances.
Chung is greatest identified for his affiliation with Dansaekhwa (or “monochrome portray”), a mode of summary artwork that emerged within the mid-Nineteen Seventies in Korea and which discovered new curiosity within the West within the twenty first century.
With roots in Korea’s earlier, extra expressive Informel portray of the late Nineteen Fifties and Nineteen Sixties, Dansaekhwa was distinguished by labor-intensive processes, repetitive gestures, and low-key palette. Along with Chung, practitioners related to Dansaekhwa embody Park Search engine optimization-Bo, Lee Ufan, and Yun Hyong-Keun, amongst others.
In step with Dansaekhwa issues, Chung’s mature works had been produced by repeatedly making use of paint, folding the canvas, and peeling the paint off to attain a multilayered floor marked by damaged grids. Proscribing himself to a single piece at a time and eschewing help, Chung typically took as much as six months or a 12 months to finish a portray.
“Performing the identical motion over and over to the purpose of absurdity, that’s what defines my work,” the painter mentioned throughout his 2023 solo exhibition at Gallery Hyundai in Seoul.
Born in 1932 in Korea throughout Japanese colonial rule, Chung enrolled within the School of Advantageous Arts at Seoul Nationwide College in 1953. In his early abstractions, made within the turbulent period following the top of the Korean Warfare (1950–53), he adopted the gestural visible language of the Informel motion.
After a 1969 transfer to Kobe, Japan, nonetheless, Chung started to curiosity himself in portray as a document of time and course of. By the late Nineteen Seventies he was creating his signature monochrome gridded canvases.
In 1977, following the demise of his spouse, Chung moved to Paris for 15 years. 1n 1992, he returned to Korea, the place he continued working till his final sickness.
Main retrospectives of Chung’s work had been held on the Musée d’artwork moderne et contemporain de Saint-Étienne Métropole in France in 2011, and on the Nationwide Museum of Trendy and Up to date Artwork, Korea, in 2021.
