Border Riders: Dreaming of Love, Hope and Freedom

EVENT DESCRIPTION

In Hong Kon’s tradition of showcasing some of the hottest Asian talent. Gallery Ascend is pleased to announce the upcoming exhibition Border Riders: Dreaming of Love, Hope and Freedom 2022, featuring the work of Ha Haeng-Eun.

Korean artist Ha Haeng-Eun’s paintings are similar to a journal; she observes the world and then reflects it on canvas, yet it is not immediately apparent as she tempers each layer with love, hope, and freedom. Throughout her career, the artist has reflected the world through a curious figure with a fluid identity that continually evolves as an echo of her observations. Ha combined the features elderly and a newborn to convey her thoughts towards and boundaries of life and reflect aspects of her personal life, surroundings, and current events, the exhibition represents the artist’s accumulated thoughts on living, death, and love.
Ha’s works are filled with wave-like strokes; it gives such diversity to even the most mono-tone background. The layers of individual patches and depths of colors are especially unique when it is placed within their eyes, all characters were given a pair of eyes that radiates lights and a galaxy-like scenery, that could perhaps remind you of a mindful night view with fireflies, exhilarating and calming at the same time.

The figure embraces humanity and everything the human spirit encounters. It strives to achieve more love, hope, and peace and shines a light so that the viewer can see the world for everything it is.
As a result, it is not surprising that this version of the figure is more optimistic, more accepting, and more hopeful than ever.

ABOUT THE ARTIST / ORGANISER

Ha Haeng-Eun was born in Jindo, South Korea in 1985. After majoring in Western painting at Deokwon Arts High School, she went on to study art at Hongik University, where she indulged in Oriental painting, Oriental philosophy, Zen, and Indian mysticism. She liked to draw from an early age, but it was after reading a book called Zhuang-zi’s “Butterfly Dream” in college and feeling mentally free and liberated that she started working on art in earnest. She dreamed of expressing ‘art’ through painting.

The complex stories of ‘nature’, ‘human’, ‘art’, and ‘everyday life’, derived from her curiosity and thoughts about the question ‘Who am I?’, appear on the canvas. The figures in her work reveal features of a baby, a girl, and an elderly woman at the same time, and therefore, the circle of life within one figure. The figure is far from the standard of beauty and is a free being. And in one figure, the old is willing to give way to the new and coexist with each other.

The artist pursues the truth by balancing and harmonizing the opposing things. As opposed to ‘death’, the problematic consciousness of her early 20s, she reinterpreted ‘birth’. When she looked at a newborn baby, he reminded her of an old man, and at the same time, she thought that he was in a state of freedom and a being of possibility that was in contact with the invisible and unknown boundary. And while acknowledging that feelings of death and emptiness have arisen within her, she actively draws light into her paintings to counteract negative feelings and moves forward with the positivity of life. It is similar to the method of making ‘0 (zero)’ by actively generating an opposing one.

She draws based on what she sees in her reality but freely travels through her time through her work. She often borrows elements from the canon of art history, yet her work is related to her own real life. During her school years, she had access to famous art-historical works, both in printed art books and in a variety of popular media. The canon was as close to her life as pop culture and made her dream enjoyable. Her work is a metaphor for life and art, and her personal feelings and experiences in the world she lives in are actively reflected on the canvas.
Currently, Ha Haeng-Eun lives and works in Seoul. She communicates with the world through exhibitions not only in Korea but also abroad.