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Artist Chung Sang-hwa poses in his studio in Yeoju, Gyeonggi Province, in 2023 / Courtesy of Gallery Hyundai
Chung Sang-hwa, a number one determine in Korean trendy artwork whose meticulously constructed and cracked monochrome surfaces turned the flat canvas right into a subject of quiet depth, handed away Wednesday morning after a chronic sickness. He was 93.
Over a profession that stretched from the upheaval of the 1950-53 Korean Conflict to the worldwide rediscovery of Korean modernism, Chung pursued one query with near-ascetic focus: the way to push the aircraft past its limits with out abandoning it. His reply was not a picture however a technique — a cycle of “peeling off” and “filling in” that demanded bodily endurance and near-ritual repetition.
Working with canvas, kaolin clay and pigment, Chung reduce and stretched the material, utilized and dried layers of white kaolin, eliminated the canvas from its body, folded it horizontally and vertically to create fissures, then returned it to the stretcher. He repeatedly excavated and refilled the floor, constructing paint in layers till a grid emerged — not as a drawn design however because the residue of a course of. The completed works, typically learn as minimalist and monochromatic from a distance, carried what he described because the file of bodily and psychological labor, a time-based accumulation that would not be convincingly imitated.
In a 2023 interview with curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, Chung framed his work as a lifelong pursuit with out closure.
“There is no such thing as a such factor as completion,” he mentioned, reflecting on a long time spent transferring between Korea, Japan and France. “Artwork is, how ought to I put it, starting the infinite. It’s not that I’ll make an finish. It’s doing the infinite.”
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