A visit to the studio of Chung Sang-Hwa
I recently visited the Korean painter Chung Sang-Hwa (b. 1932) in his studio and home deep in the Yeoju countryside about an hour south-east of Seoul. Chung is to have a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul in May, and I have been asked to write one of the catalogue essays. Chung can be described as a ‘monochrome’ painter., and my essay explores the relationship of his style of painting and those made by Western monochrome artists, such as Kazimir Malevich, Yves Klein, Pietro Manzoni and Robert Ryman.These days, Chung is usually discussed in relation to Dansaekhwa, a stye fo painting that, broadly speaking, can be described as monochromatic, and which I discussed in an earlier post.
Visually, Chung’s paintings consist of a uniform, but also highly textured terrain, which is the result of a systematic method of applying and removing kaolin and acrylic paint. This involves preparing the front of the canvas with acrylic paint and kaolin, marking out the reverse side of an unstretched canvas with a grid of pencil lines, and then pleating the canvas by using a plasterer’s jointing knife to crack the front surface along the gridded lines. He then works on the front, removing further layers and adding acrylic paint. The result is a very complex surface, the result of a procedure that balances pre-meditated conscious action with the aleatory. The emphasis on creating an all-over physical terrain has the important result of flattening out the internal, relational, fictive or virtual space within painting, and as a result, the model of painting as something defined as a planar surface upon which a pictorial language organized around the imposition of a specific hierarchy of apprehension – of focusing on some parts and not on others - is replaced by a model based on a more uniform distribution of visual attention across the whole surface.
Chung physically interacts with his surface in a regimented, repetitive way. As a result, and as is generally the case with painters who adopt a monochrome style, Chung relinquishes most of the liberties associated with the modern, Western, idea of artistic freedom, creativity, and subjectivity, and turns instead to the ritualized reiteration of basic manual operations. His actions are emphatically insistent, repetitive and time-consuming. They seem to have more in common with artisanal activities such as weaving or platting, or agricultural practices such as tilling, harrowing and leveling, than with what we usually consider ‘fine art’ painting. Indeed, comparing the appearance of Chung’s paintings to austere woven surfaces such as rugs or baskets, or to a field cleared and prepared for planting, signals the fact that freedom of invention, the hallmark of Western art since Romanticism, has been willingly sacrificed.
When I talked with Chung he emphasized that the surface he creates is not flat in the sense of being a two-dimensional plane. For him, the surface is not important for what it potentially opens up and discloses, nor for what it hides. It does not separate or cover up, but rather is something that is inhabited, a space of interpenetration, where the solid meets the immaterial. He talked of the ‘rightness’ of the surface as dependent on the multitude of pleats, fissures, cracks and repainted areas. The surface is layered, but has no topside and underside. By emphasizing surface, Chung seeks a close link between the eye, the hand, and bodily animation, and encourages an intimate, immersive, kind of encounter. The surface is the ground for interactions and continuous transformations, for an exploration of creative processes through which human action is harmonized in order to achieve reciprocity with the nonhuman through what Chung refers to as ‘the tempo of our breath.’ In an interview with Bona Yoo from 2020 Chung said: “For me, the process of elimination and reapplying is a way to explore and construct flatness of the canvas. From there, I discover movement and also rhythm, like the rhythm and tempo of breath. You can feel the painting breathe, as we ourselves do. You have to feel this.”[i]
Chung’s indigenous cultural context offers him a way of understanding the surface of painting as the site for the arising of meaning from practiced and ritualized interaction. But what kind of analogies best describe Chung’s special kind of flatness? The archaeological metaphor which has been employed in English-language criticism in relation to Chung’s practice - his ‘quasi-archeological process’[ii] – seems potentially misleading. It implies that Chung is involved in excavation, unearthing or laying bare in order to reveal something hidden, that some extra-sensory content - spiritual, psychological, symbolic, historical, theoretical - is to be extracted from his surface. This supposition in its turn is premised on a metaphysical assumption that the surface is only external appearance that hides the real or true essence to be found deep inside or in the mind of the artist. In the Western tradition a surface tends to be either physical presence or is distrusted and judged superficial. As Robert Ryman wrote, for him the monochrome surface means there is ‘no illusion’, and a painting is reduced to the status of an artefact freed from inferential, metaphorical, significance. But Chung’s surface does not deliver only the experience of here-and-now presence. Then again, it is not something to be ‘excavated’ in the search for meaning below, and does not carrying us towards some hidden, essential, meaning. Chung’s manipulation and sustained attention to surface is significant because it produces valuable dimensions of experience, and generates meaningful changes inperceptions and relationships to the surrounding world. His work forcefully suggests that there is nothing underneath the surface, but that this surface is an intermediary and the real site of the generation of meaning. What is to be found lies before or eyes and fingers.
A better range of metaphors to describe Chung’s painting was suggested by Chung in our conversation, and are drawn from agriculture. He is ‘farming’ his surface. Indeed, even the look of his paintings’ surfaces sometimes brings to mind the straight rows of recently planted rice or the stubble intentionally left in a field after the harvest. By making this analogy, Chung is suggesting that he aims at harmonious regulation, in which the surface is a field that yields without exhausting its potential as part of a continuous cycle which is most obviously characterized by the changing seasons. The surface of a field is a zone between earth below and atmosphere above, and where the two intermingle as part of a process. Chung’s surface is also analogous to a field in the sense that it is a place of inscription, where traces of systematic movements are registered, but which is subject to two uncontrollable forces: ‘eruption’, or stresses and strains from below that cause creasing, fracturing, cracking, and forces of ‘erosion’ from above, characterized by scouring, wiping, subtracting and removing.[iii]
Another potential metaphor, this time psychological, also suggest itself, and draws attention to the fact, which was also emphasised by Chung in our conversation, that the performative dimension of his activity has overtly therapeutic and ritualistic value. His surface is the site for a dual process: doing damage and making reparation. Chung mentioned the specifically Korean emotional trait known as ‘han’ (한) which seems to afflict especially his generation’s as a result of collective trauma and memory of suffering and is usually characterized as a deep-seated anger, resentment, and unrequited sorrow regarding the fundamental injustice of the world. When seen in this context, Chung’s surface is one upon which he vents his anger and frustration, but also where he seeks to make amends. It carries the signs of violence perpetrated and of attempts to restore wholeness. Chung’s surface is one upon which personal and collective loss and damage is confronted and worked through, and his practise provides a way out of anger, estrangement, alienation and guilt through engaging in a virtuous cycle. But another way to imagine this ritual process, now seen from within a wider context, is to consider Chung’s surface as analogous to the perfect, undivided totality of reality (the tao, or way or path) which is loved and respected but inevitably riven and sundered by action in the world, and is then patiently and lovingly repaired and restored, although never successfully, hence the perpetual need to repeat the process.
I was deeply impressed by Chung Sang-Hwa’s total commitment to his artistic vision. These days, his paintings are much sought after internationally. He is a wealthy man. All his life he had to struggle, overcoming great personal, political, and cultural difficulties. Within his lifetime he has seen Korea be a colony of Japan, become divided and suffer a terrible civil war, then endure military dictatorship before transiting to democracy, and the Korea of Samsung and BTS. Throughout this turbulent period, he honed his art, following his own straight and narrow path.
A work from the 1970s.
Another from the 1970s. Below, more recent works.
[i] Bona Yoo. ‘How to Become Free: A Conversation with Chung sang-Hwa’. Chung Sang-Hwa. 1964-78. Exh. cat. (New York and London: Lévy Gorvy/Seoul: Hyundai Gallery, 2020), p.72
[ii] Lóránd Hegyi. ‘Chung Sang-Hwa’s Pictorial Messages. Perspectives of Internalization – Metaphors of Appropriation’. Chung Sang-Hwa. Exh. Cat. (Seoul: Gallery Hyundai, 2014), p.22
[iii] I am drawing here on the ideas of anthropologist Tim Ingold in his Correspondences (London: Polity, 2021) pp. 85-93.