Title of art	무제 97-10-5/Untitled 97-10-5			Sector	Painting (회화)
Art specifications	291?218cm			Material technique	Acrylic on canvas
Collection year	2004			Production year	1997
Gallery	Seoul Museum of Art			Artist	CHUNG SANG-HWA
Description of art	Chung Sang-hwa led the Art Informel with young contemporary experimentalist artists as Chung Chang-sup and Park Seo-bo in the 1960s. Works created in this period were abstract paintings characterized by their round shapes and materialistic surface touch. But then, since the early 1970s when he was in Kobe, Japan, he has been working on flat monochromatic paintings entirely comprised of repetitive regular squares filling the canvas. While these square units sometimes form diagonal lines that run across the canvas, the artist has been consistently producing pieces in which basic units in the shape of small squares fill the canvas like a mosaic piece. This surface was created by Chung’s unique production style. The canvas is first coated with a kaolin and water mixture 3-4 millimeters thick. When this first process is dried, the canvas is detached from its frame; in the back of the canvas, lines of regular length and width are drawn, and the canvas is folded along the lines, creating cracks. The canvas is fixed again to the frame, and then along the border cracks, kaolin square pieces are individually removed to make indents. The indents are then repeatedly filled with acrylic paints, producing a painting in which unique square patterns are repeatedly created along the cracks. The reason for this systematic process is that, according to Chung, “a work is complete through the process itself.” Chung’s works, defined by repetitive processes, resemble our repetitive daily lives. A number of squares are all different in size and volume on he canvas, reminding us that our lives are also different every day even when they look same, and allude to those small differences that make up our lives. Chung’s works are therefore not simple monochromatic paintings in which the canvas turns into monochromatic color fields, but an arena in which spaces of life and time are layered. Generally, Chung’s monochromatic paintings are comprised of white, but works like “Untitled 97?10?5” (1997) in blue tones are also created in a great numbers. Emotional color tones and light and shadows created by irregular cracks maximize physical and lyrical variations on the monochromatic color field paintings.
Address	61, Deoksugung-gil, Jung-gu, Seoul			Source	Seoul Metropolitan Government