Cha Hyeonwook (b. 1987) paints fantastical landscapes where the past, present, and future, as well as fact and fiction, intertwine—drawing from fragments of memory collected through personal experience. He has developed a unique visual language by skillfully combining techniques of traditional Korean landscape painting with painterly approaches found in Western art.

Trained in Korean painting, Cha Hyeonwook has consistently explored ways to reconstruct traditional painting through his own distinctive visual language rather than simply replicating established forms. In his first solo exhibition, 《Works from Reminiscence》 (Cheongju Creative Art Studio, 2015), he presented works that used traditional materials and themes, yet deconstructed and reinterpreted the visual language of classical landscape painting.
 
In his ink paintings on hanji (Korean mulberry paper), traces of traditional painting remain—such as direct references to historical works, practiced brush techniques, and his handling of ink. However, as one follows the flow of ink across the surface, nontraditional elements emerge, subtly diverging from the conventions of classical Korean landscape painting.

In Cha Hyeonwook’s paintings, traditional landscapes often dissolve into blurred forms, with ink stains and washes taking their place. Classical compositional techniques commonly found in Korean landscape painting—such as “angsi” (deep perspective), “bugam” (bird’s-eye view), or “pyeongwonbeop” (horizontal layout)—are notably absent. Rather than depicting actual mountains and rivers observed from nature, his landscapes diverge from the conventional approach of painting from real scenery (silgyeong).
 
Instead, Cha seems to engage with landscape not through direct observation, but through the acquisition of landscape as a form of visual language. As critic Kang Sun Hak notes, “His work is less about landscape as a physical space and more about dismantling or reassembling the idea of landscape through conceptual inference.”

Cha Hyeonwook experiments with the properties of traditional materials by embracing effects such as bleeding and blurring, or by collaging paper to leave seams and surface irregularities across the picture plane. Through these layered techniques, he creates movements of form that rely on chance.
 
In doing so, he deconstructs and reconstructs the conventional methods of depicting specific landscape imagery, traditionally used in Korean landscape painting. By borrowing the visual language of sansuhwa (Korean landscape painting) while breaking away from its representational logic, Cha explores the new visual potential of ink as a material within a contemporary context.

Since around 2017, Cha Hyeonwook—who had primarily painted abstract yet representational landscapes while experimenting with the properties of ink—began incorporating elements of his personal daily life into his work. For instance, in his 2018 solo exhibition 《Night Blooming Flowers》 at the Daegu Art Center, figures began to appear harmoniously within his compositions. Unlike his earlier works, which depicted only landscapes, these new paintings embraced everyday narratives interwoven with human presence.

This shift in Cha Hyeonwook’s work was sparked by a visit to an observatory in 2016. The artist recalls how the mysterious scenery of the universe seen through a telescope stirred a deep sense of nostalgia from his childhood. He began to recall small, everyday memories—such as reading a set of science encyclopedias his mother had bought for him, and especially his favorite pages about space.
 
Drawing on these fragments of childhood memories, Cha began to project autobiographical narratives onto the figures in his paintings. Works like 가득한 밤 (A Night Filled), 소년의 시간 (The Boy’s Time), and Annapurna feature characters that reflect special, engraved moments from his past—himself playing with friends by a valley stream, or memories from his travels in Nepal.

In Cha Hyeonwook’s work, cosmic imagery began to emerge as a backdrop to his ink-filled landscapes. Art critic Kim Namsu noted, “With expanding memory, cosmic imagination represented by celestial bodies, and spatiality foreign to the tradition of Korean painting, Cha was laying the groundwork for what could be called ‘sci-fi sansu (landscapes).’”
 
Drawing from his chance encounter with the universe through a telescope—an experience that unexpectedly unearthed childhood memories long thought forgotten—Cha began envisioning new worlds of possibility within his landscapes. These long-lost memories, revived in the present, now serve as elements within his paintings that allow him to imagine a future beyond the present self.

Cha Hyeonwook’s 2020 work Endless Night depicts an imagined world where memories of night skies from his past are interwoven with later experiences—both in place and event. While every element in the scene stems from the artist’s real-life encounters, the resulting composition presents a surreal, otherworldly space.
 
In this work, Cha employs ink-wash techniques that allow pigments to bleed and spread, emphasizing a sense of “layering.” This is not layering in terms of physical thickness, but rather a layering of traces—marks that seem to disappear yet persist. The resulting imagery traverses boundaries between night and day, past and present, self and other. What emerges is another form of the “self,” shaped through these overlapping and interconnected relationships.

A closer look at Cha Hyeonwook’s work reveals thin margins between subjects and scenes, or empty spaces deeply carved into thick layers of jangji (traditional Korean paper). These voids serve as organic connectors within the world of the painting—passageways for imagining what lies beyond the visible. They act as in-between spaces where meaning emerges and expands, offering a site of transition, reflection, and potential transformation.

Since 2020, Cha Hyeonwook’s work has evolved beyond monochromatic ink paintings to include richly colored compositions that reinterpret traditional Korean coloring techniques. Cha Hyeonwook presses hanji paper to create textured surfaces with embossed marks, then applies color by layering dry, short brushstrokes in the same manner he uses to manipulate ink.

And he uses ‘anchae’, a watercolor made by mixing Korean painting pigments with glue and natural starch, and ‘hobun’, made from natural lime such as seashell, all while employing elements of line derived from traditional Korean landscape painting. Simultaneously, Cha adopts a Western painting attitude in the spontaneous combination and placement of colors and subjects, and variation in techniques.
 
These characteristics play a crucial role in allowing Cha to break the boundaries between traditional Korean and Western landscape painting, thus establishing his unique artistic oeuvre.

Cha Hyeonwook’s recent works depict a continuously interconnected and overlapping world by collecting personal experiences and memories through ongoing interaction with the surrounding environment and reconstructing them into artistic images. Rather than transferring past memories vividly and intact into the present, he paints scenes where fact and fiction intermingle, composed of fragmented memories originating from various places and situations.
 
Past memories, when recalled from the present, may be omitted, distorted, or exaggerated depending on emotions or circumstances. The artist’s background—frequently moving rather than settling in one place—became a crucial catalyst for exploring the incompleteness of memory. After relocating from Daegu to Seoul in 2019, he began considering himself a stranger, marking a turning point in his artistic practice.

Cha Hyeonwook weaves fantastical landscapes by combining fragments of memories collected through relationships formed in various unfamiliar places. Although these memory fragments gather within his works, they maintain a certain distance from each other, separated by thin spaces.
 
In other words, the fragments of memory within his works do not form a single solid mass but create an incomplete whole. The artist views this incompleteness as a source from which “questions arise, and the potential to transform into something else is born.”

In addition, his works reveal a creative approach that assigns new value to ordinary objects or concepts, unlike traditional collectors, combining these fragments of memory to create new subjects and scenes. In particular, recurring motifs such as trees and clouds serve as symbols of memory and emotion, reflecting the artist’s sense of being an outsider shaped by his movements across different regions. 

The willow tree often metaphorically represents memories of his hometown, while the juniper embodies the awkward and alienated figure of a foreigner who has migrated to unfamiliar places. Natural symbols like the “day moon” that appears on the boundary between day and night and the ephemeral clouds frequently depicted in his works serve to blur the lines between memory and time, reality and fantasy.
 
Therefore, for him, memory is not something that simply remains in the past but living fragments that reconnect with the present and, through this process, shape a new future.

Cha Hyunwook reinterprets traditional Korean landscape painting into his own visual language, creating a link between the past, present, and future while exploring his personal identity. In this process, he adopts a free and experimental artistic approach that blurs the boundaries between East and West, linear conceptions of time, and reality and unreality, thereby expanding the horizons of traditional painting.

 "A story is made up of countless illusions and facts intertwined. An individual's life is like these incomplete stories gathering as if drawn by some gravity, and when these come together, they form society and move toward the connected parts and the whole. My work is one such imperfect story."    (Cha Hyunwook, Artist’s Note)

Cha Hyeonwook studied Korean painting at Kyungpook National University and graduated with a Master of Fine Arts from the Korean National University of Arts. His solo exhibitions include 《Low Glide》 (Arario Gallery, Seoul, 2024), 《Stranger》 (Gallery Playlist, Busan, 2023), 《A Little More, Closer》 (The Necessaries, Seoul, 2022), 《Staying through the Shadow》 (Gallery 175, Seoul, 2020), 《Night Blooming Flowers》 (Daegu Art Center, Daegu, 2018), among others.
 
Cha has also participated in numerous group exhibitions such as those held at Incheon Art Platform (Incheon, 2025), Outhouse (Seoul, 2023), Kumho Museum of Art (Seoul, 2022), Daegu Art Factory (Daegu, 2020), Jeonnam International Sumuk Biennale (Jindo, 2018), Zaha Museum (Seoul, 2018), Daegu Art Museum (Daegu, 2018), Posco Gallery (Pohang, 2016), and Cheongju Art Studio (Cheongju, 2016, 2014).
 
Cha was awarded the ‘Young Artist of the Year’ (Daegu Art Center, Daegu) in 2018 and the ‘4th Gwangju Hwaru Artist Award’ (Gwangju Bank, Gwangju) in 2020 and his works are in public collections such as the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Art Bank, Daegu Art Museum, Daegu Arts Center and Seoul National University Museum of Art.

References

• 차현욱, Cha Hyeonwook (Artist Website)
• 아라리오갤러리, 차현욱 (Arario Gallery, Cha Hyeonwook)
• 네오룩, [서문] 청주창작스튜디오 – 회상된 습작 (Neolook, [Preface] Cheongju Creative Art Studio - Works from Reminiscence)
• 대구문화원연합회, <문화를 잇는 사람들? – 올해의 청년작가 한국화 차현욱 작가, 2018.07.26
• 국립현대미술관 미술은행, 차현욱 – 끝없는 밤 (MMCA Art Bank, Cha Hyeonwook - Endless Night)
• 금호미술관, 어떤 삶, 어떤 순간 – 차현욱 작가 소개글 (Kumho Museum of Art, Our Lives, Our Momnets – Cha Hyeonwook)
• 아라리오갤러리, 저공비행 (Arario Gallery, Low Glide)
• 아트인컬처, [New Look] 차현욱, 2024.03.05