Lot 1279: CHA MYUNG HI

CHA MYUNG HI
(B. 1947)
Gaze; Gaze; & Gaze
signed in Korean; dated '08' (lower right of each work); signed in Korean (on the stretcher of each work)
three charcoal and acrylic on canvas
73 x 90.4 cm. (28 3/4 x 35 5/8 in.); 90.5 x 72.7 cm. (35 5/8 x 28 5/8 in.); & 73 x 90.8 cm. (28 3/4 x 35 3/4 in.) (3)
Painted in 2008
(3)

Abandoning colours and choosing to marvel between characteristics of black and white, poetry and painting, east and west, Cha Myung Hi creates abstract paintings that ponder on the potency of compositional and textural aesthetics driven by her pure insight and integrity, a philosophical underpinning rooted from oriental paintings.

Cha interweaves delicate vertical lines of charcoal with horizontally layered acrylics onto the canvas in minimalist sophistication. The organic black lines appear free but she aims at more than spontaneity as the consistency in the dry marking of the charcoal exhibits the artist's steady and controlled hands, thus revealing her sense of self discipline and aesthetic consciousness. Cha's reduction of nature and pictorial description direct the aesthetic essence on atmospheric perspective to shape different spatial dimensions in each of the three paintings.

The gradual lightening and darkening of the monochrome regulates the sense of shadow and depth together with her soft acrylics sweeping across the picture to set blocks of spatial planes for the foreground and the background. Cha then cleverly blurs our vision with softly mounting haze of white and grey to challenge our perceptive eyes to utilize the insinuative organic rendering to distinguish and expand our creative vision and Gaze (Lot 1279) into the three abstract landscapes and differentiate its diverse perceptive angles; an up-close intimate composition created with tight and similarly contoured charcoal lines; gradual broadening of the space echoed with three vertical black lines placed behind one another; and an infinite view into an empty background implied through the singular stroke in the foreground with scattered succinct strokes in the vanishing white background. By utilizing lines as the purest and fundamental geometric form, Cha roams within the flexible and universal characteristics of abstraction that is deficient of narrative statement, creating transcendent naturalistic rendering that exceeds the painting and becomes an infinite landscape.