Un Passage: ‘communicating’ with color

The Un Passage series, accounting for most of the entries in this exhibition, is the central axis of HA’s work, making it necessary to consider how its meaning and methodology were created and transformed. Her first solo exhibition in 1995, before Un Passage, featured Vomiting, Dumb, Gossipers, and Self-Portrait, all done in an expressionist style directly conveying the many intense emotions she experienced on her way to study in France after her father’s death. Building on this foundation, HA has created and formed her own unique approach and pour her story and sincerity onto the canvas.
Despite the repetition of the standardized curved elements in Un Passage, this was not an immersion in the experiment of form itself. HA began to pay more attention to the subject of ‘communication’ while studying at the Ecole Nationale Superieure D’art et Design de Dijon (graduated in 1994) and École des Beaux-Arts, Paris (graduated in 1998) in France. The difficulties of linguistic and cultural communication that she encountered while studying abroad were initially expressed as ‘the uncertainty of complete communication with others’, using gestures implying the negativity of meaning. From 1998, the letters of the alphabet and Hangul began to appear mixed and overlapped on the canvas, losing their original meanings. After returning to Korea in 1999, in her work from 2003 onwards letters were covered or erased by color surfaces
and color bands. Thereafter the work Un Passage evolved in the form as we know it. Letters are the most important tool of communication, embodying Western mechanistic thinking such as rationality, progression, and generally masculine characters. However, at the same time they also surpass this function, and incorporate the impossibility of communication
itself. This aspect is enhanced by the gesture that negates and erases the letters. As the artist states, ‘this is the manifestation of a desperate desire for a complete communication’. She used ‘the color yellow, which contains ambivalent meaning, as a color of nature and, impressively, as the most artificial color, to erase and cover’. In this way, the prototype of HA’s work – the pursuit of communication, symbolic color and gestures – was established.
After entering a PhD course at the Hong-ik University in 2004, the series of Un Passage, La Porte, Un Impression etc. were developed between 2006 and 2012.
Her interest moved from the color bands erasing the letters to the contrast of colors, as the letters slowly disappear from the canvas. The artist comments on this process as follows:

“At first, I expressed erasing of the letters in the picture with yellow and white colors. From then on, the letters gradually disappear from my works. I believed that it can still be beautiful even if there is no content or figure. Colors and light that remained after such processes gave me comfort. So I decided to communicate in color.” (Taeim Ha, Interview for Living Sense, 2020)

The theme of Un Passage, which the artist has continued to work on, thus progresses to ‘communication through color’. Color bands that once existed to erase letters have now emerged as independent formative elements, while further emphasizing their repetitive performance. In Un Passage, yellow or white color bands evolved from earlier patterns of
erasing, intersecting like a flat spider web to reveal a space in between, to now performing new and independent roles, such as making harmonies or dividing layers. Gradually released from their shackles, these color bands
have finally reached the ultimate form that creates musical rhythm as they crisscross, pull, and push each other, creating tension in space. The study of color bands and their musical dynamics is systematized in HA’s PhD thesis: ‘The dynamic painted effect of nonlinear C-pattern composition used by color bands.’
HA became interested in the unconscious aspects of colors and the changes of emotion caused by their arrangement. When the colors began to speak by themselves, the artist was able to depict the waves of emotion and communication following the realm of sights and senses, instead of the language of signs and letters.
HA thereafter began to focus on color bands even more earnestly. In Une Extension in 2015 she tried to create 3-dimentional color bands using stainless steel material. In 2018, she experimented with a video version of Un Passage. In recent years, HA further varied this theme by placing the canvas on the wall instead of laying it down to be painted upon, and used the drips and drops of paint instead. Sometimes color bands are skewed to one side, leaving more white space on the canvas. Other compositions use blue and greenish color bands on gray backgrounds without her typical fluorescent red.

Hyein Kwon Curator, Seoul Museum of Art