CHUNG SANGHWA | Untitled 87-12-17

signed in Hanja and English, titled in Hanja and dated 1987 on the reverse

Private Asian Collection
Hong Kong, Sotheby's S|2 Gallery, Avant Garde Asia - Lines of Korean Masters, March 2015
Acquired by the present owner from the above

Hong Kong, Sotheby's S|2 Gallery, Avant Garde Asia - Lines of Korean Masters, March 2015, p. 49, lot 57 (illustrated in colour)

Abstracting Light, Abstracting Time
Chung Sanghwa

The main issue in which he seeks is time. Time is within his work. Time cannot exist if there is no one to feel it. Therefore, time is something that exists through experience, not through pure existence. - Lorand Hegyi

Untitled 87-12-17 is exquisitely, hypnotically riveting with a mesmeric presence, exhibiting a rare complex mosaic-like composition that continuously refracts light with its dual hues of white and peacock blue. Varying shades of jewel-toned sapphire entwine with pure white in an enthralling latticed montage, which is itself encased in a serial grid that stretches across the square canvas. There are only three works in existing literature bearing the same dual-coloured palette and complicated mosaic and grid composition; amongst the three, the current work is the largest and the only one executed on a square canvas, rendering it a rare and exultant masterpiece exhibiting the full triumphant scale of the technical and spiritual sublimity of the Dansaekhwa master’s signature process of painting, carving and re-filling. Deeply meditative and rigorous in methodology as well as in thought, the consummate work constitutes a beautifully divine space through which to contemplate on the ephemerality of time, gesture and existence.

Chung was born in 1932 in South Korea and received his BFA from the College of Fine Arts at Seoul National University in 1956. He first started producing pieces with fractal patterns and grid-like structures in the 1950s and further developed this concept after his brief stay in Paris from 1967 to 1968 and his years living and working in Kobe, Japan in the early 1970s. Surrounded by talk of the Informel movement, Chung became increasingly preoccupied with the materiality of canvas and paint, conceptualizing the relation between the two as akin to the moulding of sculptural works. Consequently, he began to challenge the traditional constraints of flatworks, developing a highly specific and wholly unique methodology. After priming his canvases with kaolin clay or zinc, the artist repeatedly scores and excavates acrylic from the canvas surface, employing a ritualistic, intuitive and meticulous method where paint is repeatedly coated on and ripped off. The resulting lattice tends exquisitely towards the sculptural, unfolding upon close viewing into intricate layers and surfaces that undulates with ethereal lyrical radiance.

Okyang Chae-Duporge describes Chung’s process as thus: “In its first stage, he applies zinc paint to a canvas, when dried completely, he draws lines on the reverse of the canvas and then folds [it] in horizontal, vertical, and diagonal directions […] Consequently, the zinc paint cracks finely along the canvas, each crack appearing irregular, in it opposing geometry’s checkered patterns […] His canvas is fixed again at this stage, from which a lengthy orchestration of the canvas begins […] Chung takes away zinc paint scraps one by one, not linearly one after another, nor in the same time period, but according to his rhythm […] After taking away some of the zinc, Chung applies acrylic. Just a little of the paint penetrates the canvas and the rest is removed. When dried, he again removes some paint before applying another layer to an already dry surface, or to another section from the erased zinc. He often repeats this process until the zinc is completely removed, so that many colour layers (14 to 16 layers) accumulate” (Chung Sanghwa: Painting Archaeology, 2009, p. 105).

The current lot was created in 1987 during Chung’s Paris period (1977-1993), a decade and a half in which the artist was a key driving force of Korean Dansaekhwa (“Monochrome Painting”) and during which his technique deepened and matured. The present work displays an especially complex composition, creating a sophisticated mosaic-effect that constitutes a metaphor for the phenomenon of visual perception itself. As Okyang observes: “In Eye and Mind, French philosopher Merleau-Ponty illustrates the complexity of a perceptual phenomenon by a swimming pool tile seen through the water itself and shimmering reflections of the water’s surface. Chung Sanghwa’s work evokes this metaphor […] Even though he uses grids, he rejects its fundamental characteristics […] thereby creating space in various flows. His canvas appears persistent, but is not a wall of silence. Unlike minimalism, which intends to express the absence of artists and contents the artist’s intention of structuring the space is present throughout Chung’s work. In this sense, his work seems parallel to European Art Concret but appears more poetic with humanistic lyricism” (Ibid., p. 104).

Ultimately, Chung’s labour-intensive process, combined with his meticulous meditative dexterity, belies limitless perfectionism and precision in which his laborious strokes give way to a labyrinth of visual detail. Despite abandoning all formal representation since 1973, the highly textured pictorial surfaces of Chung’s canvases echo a kind of weathered landscape where, as Korean art historian Kang Taehi 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” (“From the Event Horizon: Light and Darkness in Chung Sang-Hwa’s Paintings”, in Exh. Cat., Chung Sang-Hwa, 2014, n.p.). Chung grew up by the sea, and in the multi-dimensional blue of the present work 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.