LIST OF NO’S 

HWI HAHM 

The exhibition’s title, List of No’s, reflects this process of refusal. Each painting emerges from a series of decisions about what not to depict, explain, or resolve. Hahm turns inward, using the studio as a place to question his own position, his relationship to painting, and the limits of representation.

In Celebration of Insignificance, a sequence of color structures leads the eye toward the moon. While the composition initially suggests a landscape, blocks of color interrupt the sense of depth, flattening the image and returning the viewer to the work as a painting. The work considers the distance between reality and its representation, as well as the possibility that things invested with profound meaning may ultimately be insignificant. Its monumental scale heightens this contradiction, giving physical weight to the idea of insignificance itself.

The painting takes its conceptual cue from Milan Kundera’s writing on insignificance as an ever-present condition of existence. For Hahm, this idea also relates to painting: an image can evoke a world while remaining an arrangement of color and form—an idea of reality rather than reality itself.

Alone in the Studio turns toward the psychological and physical experience of the artist’s studio. An expansive white mass occupies the composition alongside suggestions of architectural space and canvas stretcher bars. The painting loosely recalls the metaphysical environments of Giorgio de Chirico, whose dislocated spaces and objects turn ordinary surroundings into spaces of uncertainty.

Throughout List of No’s, Hahm considers what painting can communicate when it refuses to communicate explicitly. What remains after these acts of elimination is neither pure abstraction nor straightforward representation. Instead, his paintings occupy the space between the two.