Ha Chong Hyun’s six decades of radical canvas experiments

Deep ultramarine blue, its surface worked with vertical grooves and ridges that catch the light like a carefully landscaped field, dominates the first gallery at Lisson London. This is Ha Chong Hyun’s vocabulary: colour as material, surface as gesture, the canvas itself as terrain to be folded, pressed, manipulated and reinvented. The Seoul based artist has spent six decades interrogating what painting might become when you refuse to treat it as a flat, precious object.

The exhibition moves with remarkable coherence through his evolution. Early works from the late 1960s show folded and rippled canvases that already reject convention; the paint responds to sculptural intervention rather than following the artist’s hand. Alongside these sit pieces from his Conjunction and Post Conjunction series, works where he layers colour, texture and conceptual rigour until the distinction between painting and object becomes productively blurred. What emerges is an artist for whom monochromatic and minimalist language serves not as restraint but as liberation: a strict visual field within which gestural abstraction and material experimentation can flourish.

The gallery’s white walls and generous ceiling light make visible what might otherwise hide: the delicate gradations of tone, the embedded threads, the ways Ha has treated canvas as both support and subject. A red canvas with a burnished, almost landscape like recession speaks differently beside the cool blue works, yet both share the same philosophical commitment to painting as a performative, embodied act. This is not decoration. It is an archaeology of possibility.

Ha Chong Hyun at Lisson London is on view through 7 November 2026.

Imagery courtesy of Lisson Gallery (@lisson_gallery).