Chung Sang-Hwa, the South Korean Dansaekwa painter celebrated for his textured monochromatic canvases, died at 93 on January 28th in Seoul following a long illness. His death was announced by Gallery Hyundai, which has represented him for over four decades since 1983.
Chung was a pioneering figure in the postwar Korean abstraction movement and contemporary Korean art at large. He was known especially for his technique of applying, then peeling away, layers of dry paint, glue, and kaolin, a soft white mineral clay. In this way, he would reveal the brown hemp of the cloth or other colored brush marks below.
Chung was born in 1932 in Yeongdeok, South Korea, during the Japanese colonial rule. He began making work as a student at the college of fine arts at Seoul National University, covering canvases with gestural marks. He used dark palettes of oil mixed with charcoal powder and kaolin, which became foundational to his practice, in response to the fear and instability of the Korean War. After graduation he moved to Paris for a period before relocating to Kobe, Japan in 1969. It was there he encountered a group of artists including Jiro Yoshihara and Kazuo Shiraga from the Gutai movement, whose radical practices encouraged him to develop the peeling, folding, and cracking rituals that became central to his art. In 1977 he returned to France and introduced colors including black, blue, and red, before relocating to Korea in 1992 and establishing his studio in the mountains of Yeoju, South Korea, where he continued to work until his death.
Untitled 85-3-9 , Acrylic on canvas
Chung Sang Hwa
Gallery Hyundai
Over the course of nearly seven decades, his work has been widely shown across Asia, Europe, and the United States, beginning with his first solo exhibition at the Central Report Institute in Seoul in 1962. Chung’s work is held in collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C., the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, Korea, and the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, among other institutions worldwide. He has been the subject of major retrospectives at the Musée d’art moderne et contemporain de Saint-Étienne in France in 2011, and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Korea in 2021.
“Art, in a way, is about beginning something endless. It’s not about making an end.
It’s about doing something endless,” the artist told curator Hans Ulrich Obrist in an interview in 2023. The artist Lee Ufan shared a handwritten letter of condolence via Gallery Hyundai on Instagram. “Before the spirit of Chung Sang-Hwa, Filling in and peeling away, endlessly repeated/ A luminous painting bearing the traces of breath/ Though life comes to an end, art is eternal”
