Ha Hyojin하효진 · ハ・ヒョジン

In Joie, the saturated colors of a contemporary palette meet the deep, earthen tones of Korean tradition and resolve into a single chord. Layered upon the Neunghwaji, the colors gather as ingredients gather inside a taco — varied elements arriving together to make one whole.

The artist links this gathering to the French word joie — joy — folding into the title a quieter meaning: the joy of coming together. The work is a visual passage in which color and culture, tradition and space, meet — and through that meeting, become joy.

Damum — Neunghwaji Layer takes as its ground the traditional patterns lifted from a Neunghwapan, and over them composes a sequence of contemporary tones, each layer placed gently upon the last. The texture and pattern of the Neunghwaji breathe quietly at the lowest stratum; the flow of color above carries the work into the present.

What the piece holds is a single moment — the instant in which present-day sensibility is re-arranged upon the framework of tradition.

The Chaekgado of the Joseon dynasty — and especially of King Jeongjo's court — was a decorative painting that stood for a world of knowledge and refined sensibility. In My Chaekgado, Ha Hyojin transposes that ordered beauty into the language of Neunghwa patterning, recasting it as a new visual space.

Neunghwaji, printed from a board the artist herself carved, becomes a sculptural canvas — one that extends the cool, considered ground of the original Chaekgado into a contemporary register. Over the repeating maejuk (plum-and-bamboo) motif, deep color and structural composition gather, and the inherited pattern shifts into a new field — one capable of holding intellectual space.

In place of the old bookcase, here, the texture of Neunghwaji unfolds. My Chaekgado is a Chaekgado in Ha Hyojin's hand — a place where tradition and the contemporary cross.