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 Hongik University’s art college, where she indulged in Oriental painting, Oriental philosophy, Zen, and Indian mysticism. She liked to draw from an early age, but the reason she started working in earnest was after reading a book called Zhuangzi’s in college and feeling mentally free and liberated. She dreamed of expressing ‘art’ through painting.
The complex life stories of ‘nature’, ‘human’, ‘art’, and ‘everyday life’, which were derived from her curiosity and thoughts about the question ‘Who am I?’ and appear on the canvas. The figures revealed in her work contain children, girls, women, and the elderly at the same time without a specific age, and creation and extinction cycle within one figure. The figure is outside the standard of beauty and is a free being at a certain boundary. And in one figure, it seems that the old is willing to give way to the new and coexist with each other.
She pursues the truth by balancing and harmonizing the opposing things. As opposed to ‘death’, which was the problematic consciousness of her early 20s, she reinterpreted ‘birth’. When she looked at the newborn, she reminded him of the old man, and at the same time assumed 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 bright light into her own paintings to counteract each other and move forward with the positivity of her life. It is similar to the method of making ‘0 Zero’ by actively generating another opposing one when one occurs.
She is based on what she sees in her own reality, but freely travels through her time through her work. She often borrows classical art and her work is related to her own realistic life. During her student years, she had access to her famous art-historical works, both in printed art books and in a variety of popular media. Classical art was as close to her life as common pop culture and made her dream enjoyable. Her work is a metaphor for life and art, and her personal feelings and experiences are actively reflected in the current situation.
Currently, She lives and works in Seoul, and communicating with the world through exhibitions not only in Korea but also abroad.