Untitled 72-C 1972

Ha Chong-Hyun made Untitled 72-C with oil paint on hemp cloth. I'm just imagining Ha, in his studio, pushing paint through the back of the canvas. Laborious, right? It’s like he’s trying to get the paint to meet him halfway. But it doesn't. There is resistance! I get the feeling that he really had to work for it, coaxing and coercing the paint through the canvas. These repetitive marks, it’s like a meditation on surface and structure. Are the lines boundaries or connections? Look how the paint blooms on the other side, kind of like a stubborn, yet elegant, persistence. It makes you think about process, doesn’t it? How the act of making is a conversation between the artist and the material, a dance of intention and accident. I wonder if he was thinking of Fontana and his slashed canvases? Anyway, it's cool to see how artists keep talking to each other across time, inspiring new ways of seeing and making.