KQED critic finds Ha Chong-Hyun’s paintings almost good enough to taste

In KQED Arts, critic Letha Ch'ien reviews a retrospective of Korean painter Ha Chong-Hyun at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. The show brings together more than 50 paintings from six decades by an artist the article calls the father of Korean modernism, who is still little known in the United States. Ha was born in 1935 in Korea under Japanese colonial rule. His first materials were burlap from U.S. grain shipments and army sandbags, and his early works also use hemp, metal springs and barbed wire. Ha later developed a technique called the back-pressure method, in which wet paint is pushed through the back of a coarsely woven cloth so that beads of color appear on the front. Museum director Soyoung Lee compares the paintings to ice cream, and the critic admits an urge to touch them. Ha, now 91, is still working, and the critic praises the new freedom of color in his recent paintings. She sees his physical, handmade practice as a counterweight to San Francisco's age of AI. The exhibition runs through January 25, 2027. Photo by Joyofmuseums, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.