Chung Sang-Hwa

Private Collection, Japan

Private Collection, Europe

Acquired from the above by the present owner

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate, although it fails to convey the textured nature of the canvas and the hints of colour in the grided lines. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Close inspection reveals some minute cracks and minute associated losses in places to the scalpelled grid which appear in-keeping with the artist's working process, a few to the extreme overturn edges. No restoration is apparent under ultra-violet light.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

“ [Chung Sang-Hwa’s] work accumulates personal experience into cosmic space. He starts out with a white canvas and adds up rich details little by little. He can be seen as an archaeologist burying artifacts back into the ground.”

Lóránd Hegyi on Chung Sang-Hwa, quoted in: Exh. Cat., Daegu, Wooson Gallery, Chung Sang-Hwa: On Time and Labour, 2013, p. 45.

Contemplative and meticulous, Chung Sang-Hwa’s work reveals its mesmerising beauty upon close inspection. A hypnotic piece that exudes an inner calmness and spirituality, Untitled 81-5 is, like many of the artist’s monochrome canvases, a deft amalgamation of Eastern and Western ideals, and a conscious elaboration on traditional Korean art. Born in 1932 in South Korea, Chung received a BFA from the College of Fine Arts at the Seoul National University in 1956, before moving to Paris in 1967 and living thereafter between France and Japan. Inspired by the predominant abstract aesthetic of Art Informel, Chung began investigating the materiality of paint and canvas, seeing the relation between the two as akin to the moulding of sculptural works. In turn, he was a driving force of the Dansaekhwa, or Monochrome Painting, movement in Korean art in the 1970s and 1980s, where a single colour became the starting point for meditative and repetitive pieces. As in works by the American Minimalists, Dansaekhwa paintings invited and deflected the viewer’s gaze in ways that enabled audiences to affirm their own sense of presence, yet with significant political implications against the backdrop of authoritarian South Korea.  Recent exhibitions of Dansaekhwa works, including those presented as part of the present Dansaekhwa and Minimalism show at Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, and at the 56^th Venice Biennale in 2015, have seen the conceptual and formal rigour of this historical movement finally exhibited to an international audience.

Of all the Dansaekhwa artists – the group also includes Lee Ufan and Park Seobo – Chung Sang-Hwa’s pioneering work most clearly embraced the style’s core concepts: his repeated application and removal of paint, using the cracks created from the folding of canvas, form powerfully austere statements. Chung covers his canvases with kaolin, a fine, soft white clay traditionally used in making porcelain, scoring them with grids and excavating each small square, before refilling them individually with paint. Through this labour-intensive method of repeatedly layering and peeling of the paint, the artist produces fractal patterns and grid-like structures with magnificent dexterity until the entire canvas is covered. Sensual and poetic, Chung’s works are preoccupied with the ‘action of thought’: a mode of painting that puts emphasis on the meditative, almost sacred, process of creation rather than the final material result. Incorporating the Buddhist concept of ‘oneness’ and artistically akin to the ‘one stroke method’ of Eastern calligraphy, Chung’s canvases embody a means to contemplate the ephemerality of thought, with each stroke momentarily encapsulating its transience. Much like the methodical works of Roman Opalka, ever approaching infinity, the apparent simplicity of Chung’s work, as here, belies limitless perfectionism and precision, where laborious strokes give way to a labyrinth of details. Despite abandoning formal representation by 1973, the highly textured surfaces of Chung’s canvases echo a kind of weathered landscape where, as the Korean art historian Kang Taehi has noted, “the lines forming the grid… [are] reminiscent of a growing branch of a tree or veins of a leaf, and the vast surface with uneven curves suggest fluid, circulating motions of flowing water” (Kang Taehi, ‘From the Event Horizon: Light and Darkness in Chung Sang-Hwa’s Paintings’, in: Exh. Cat., Sagan-dong, Gallery Hyundai, Chung Sang-Hwa, 2014, n.p.). Chung grew up by the sea, and in the multi-dimensional white of Untitled 81-5 the rippling inner energy suggests the artist’s contemplation of the movement of water and the way light refracts among waves. Poised between modernity and tradition, creating and recreating, Chung manipulates Dansaekhwa’s formal vocabularies of austerity and simplicity to create works of outstanding physicality and vitality.