Chiara Valci Mazzara

Han Chung Shik’s (1937 -2022) solo exhibition Goyo – Berlin at the Kunstverein am Rosa Luxemburg Platz, is the first solo exhibition in Berlin of one among the most representative Korean artists, photographers and thinkers.

Han, renowned because of the discourse he developed from the classical and formalist Korean aesthetics and narratives and around the features of abstract landscape photography, significantly changed the perception – shaping its evolution- of the Korean contemporary artistic expressions within photography; during the last decades the artist theorised and then portrayed – while propounding his vision through a literary and philosophical lens – the aesthetics of the idea of ‘serenity’ as the concept of the inner awareness of the nature of existence and integral part of his artistic research.

In his photography the artist merges distinctive formalist photographic gestures with the development of the forms and shapes of abstract landscapes by tracing the idea of the act of photography as an act enabled by the very nature of the world including (abstract) ideas and their immediate fluxional expression.

The exhibited works are a selection among the artist’s most representative pieces and of some previously unpublished works.

Han Chung Shik works are in national and international private and public collections such as The National Museum of Contemporary Art (South Korea); the Seoul Museum of Art; The Seoul Museum of History; the Hanmi Museum of Photography and the Goeun Museum of Photography among many others.