91-летний южнокорейский художник Чхонхён Ха продолжает революционную технику нанесения краски с изнанки холста

‘The technique was revolutionary’: Ha Chong-Hyun, the 91-year-old South Korean artist who turned painting inside out In the early 1970s, the Korean artist Ha Chong-Hyun had a simple but novel idea: why not apply oil paint to the back of a surface rather than the front? Instead of canvas, he stretched pieces of hemp, a coarse and loosely woven fabric, and pushed the thick oil paint through the holes in the cloth. For each work he used a single colour, in a neutral or muted tone such as white or brown. On the “front” side, he then moved the paint around with various handmade tools to create something akin to brushstrokes. Ha, now 91, has remained dedicated to this technique, known as the “back-pressure method” (bae-ap-bub in Korean), ever since. He titles every piece Conjunction – because for him the work is essentially about the coming together of artist and material – along with numbers denoting the date of its creation. “The technique he developed was really revolutionary. It hadn’t been done before,” says Max Bossier, director at Lisson Gallery in London, where a selection from this decades-spanning body of work, alongside several of Ha’s earlier artistic experiments, will go on view in September. Today, Ha is recognised as among the foremost Korean painters of his generation: part of an influential group of artists who came on to the scene in the 1970s and whose work was characterised by a spare simplicity of colour and material. In the 2000s, the movement was retrospectively named Dansaekhwa, which translates roughly as “monochrome painting”. By then, the artists – other important names include Lee Ufan and Park Seo-Bo – had begun to garner recognition outside their home country, a process that Bossier tells me has only accelerated over the past decade. (The Lisson show opens the day before Ha’s first ever North American museum retrospective, at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco.) At first glance, Ha’s pared-back abstractions – and the output of the Dansaekhwa artists more broadly – may seem to share significant overlap with the other examples of non-representational painting that proliferated around the globe in the second half of the 20th century. In particular, comparisons are often drawn to the work of US minimalists such as Robert Ryman, who famously restricted his palette to white and off-white paint. But there is a deep cultural specificity to Ha’s approach that is fundamental to understanding his art. Ha was born in Sancheong in Korea in 1935, during the Japanese occupation. He lived in Japan as a child for several years before returning to Korea after liberation in 1945. “On our journey home, we encountered a violent storm at sea and I lost my grandmother and my young sibling,” he recalls. “Amid all the upheaval, I continued to draw. I remember making a portrait of Yi Jun, the Korean independence activist, which my teacher displayed on the classroom wall.” (We corresponded via email; Ha’s children translated between Korean and English.) In the turbulent decades that followed – the Korean war, postwar economic privation, a military dictatorship that didn’t end until 1988 – Ha developed an artistic language that responded to and expressed its historical circumstances. Abstraction, for him and other artists, was at least partly a way to rebel against the figurative style favoured by the state. The use of hemp as a support for his paintings, meanwhile, began as a matter of necessity. “In the poverty that followed the Korean war, conventional art supplies were difficult to obtain,” Ha explains. “Among the materials around us were coarse sacks that had carried grain and other relief supplies from abroad.” For Ha, his commitment to working back-to-front “has never meant simply repeating the same thing”. Over time, he has introduced – or reintroduced – a number of different elements to his practice: holding a flame to the surface to singe the paint, using wooden slats instead of hemp as the support, incorporating brighter colours such as red and blue. “I still believe, as I have always told my students, that ‘a painter should never allow the paint on his palette to dry’,” he says. “As long as my health allows me to stand in the studio, I want to keep working. There are still things I have not made, and things I have yet to discover.” Works by Ha Chong-Hyun will be on display at the Lisson Gallery, London, 24 September to 7 November Reverse course: five works from the exhibition White Paper on Urban Planning No 5, 1968(main image) This work is from an early series executed between 1967 and 1969. “I remember how rapidly Seoul was changing at the time,” Ha says. “The city was emerging from the devastation of war: new roads were being laid out, new buildings were rising, and the environment around us was becoming increasingly geometric and architectural. I wanted to bring something of that order and energy into my painting.” Work 72-72(B), 1972 Before he developed the back-pressure method, Ha’s work often incorporated common industrial materials such as barbed wire or metal springs. “The use of objects in these works is connected to the three-dimensional quality of his Conjunction paintings,” says Lisson Gallery’s Bossier. Conjunction 93-002, 1993 “I have always believed that an artist should not simply see things as they appear, but should find another way of looking at and interpreting them,” says Ha. “Painters normally apply paint to the front of a canvas; I began to ask myself, almost instinctively, what might happen if I approached it from the other side.” Conjunction 20-118, 2020 Since around 2010, Ha has increased his use of colour – especially reds and blues – in his work. “For me, the continuity of Conjunction lies not in repetition, but in continuing to experiment within a language that has kept opening up new possibilities,” he says. Conjunction 25-72, 2025 Bossier points to a “meditative quality” of the intensely physical and repetitive back-pressure method. Meanwhile, the “hand tools” that Ha uses to manipulate the paint once it’s been pushed through the hemp include palette knives, sticks and combs.