The Asian Art Museum Gives Ha Chong-Hyun His First North American Museum Show

The Asian Art Museum opens Ha Chong-Hyun: Retrospective on September 25, 2026, the first museum exhibition in North America for a Korean painter who has been working for sixty years. It runs through January 25, 2027 in the Yang Yamazaki Pavilion.

What the Work Actually Is

Ha Chong-Hyun, born in 1935, has spent six decades on what the museum frames as a question: what painting becomes once it is freed from existing conventions. His method is physical. The museum describes him using pressure, gravity, and tools ranging from torches to everyday utensils to work the surfaces of canvases up to eight feet tall.

The works carry the series title Conjunction, and are painted on hemp cloth rather than conventional canvas. The piece the museum is leading with, Conjunction 25-19, is dated 2025, so the retrospective ends with work finished last year rather than with the archive.

The show is organized by the Asian Art Museum with guest curator Sunjung Kim, artistic director of the Art Sonje Center, working with that institution’s curatorial team. SK PODO Museum is the presenting sponsor.

Opening Dates, Read Carefully

Several listings give September 24 as the opening. The museum’s own exhibition page says the show opens September 25. September 24 is member day: a member preview at 1 pm and a member opening night at 6 pm. A separate celebration for Giving Circle members is on September 23. General admission starts on the 25th.

Three More Shows This Fall

The retrospective is the largest of four exhibitions the museum is opening between late August and late October, so a single visit in October catches most of them.

Art from Contemporary Cambodia opens August 27. Two Cambodian artists work in mixed media drawn from memory, history and environmental crisis.

Garuda in Bali opens September 18. Balinese sculptures and paintings tell the story of the bird-warrior who became Indonesia’s national symbol.

Vishnu’s Cosmic Ocean opens October 23, and the museum describes its centerpiece as the largest ancient bronze from Southeast Asia, on a stop in San Francisco that it does not expect to repeat.

Already on view and staying up: Al-An deSouza: Table Settings and This Asian American Life both run through November 2, and Kim Minwook: On Carving, Bending, and Binding Wood runs through March 29. Two installations close earlier than the Ha Chong-Hyun opening: the FX Harsono video work and Lala Rukh’s sound piece in Samsung Hall both end September 7.

Details

When: September 25, 2026 through January 25, 2027.

Where: Asian Art Museum, 200 Larkin Street, Civic Center.

Hours: Thursday 1 pm to 8 pm, Friday through Monday 10 am to 5 pm, closed Tuesday and Wednesday. The two closed days catch people out, and Thursday does not open until the afternoon.

Cost: Tickets are sold through the museum. The museum also runs a Free First Sundays program, which is the route in for anyone timing a visit around cost.

Getting there: Civic Center Station, served by BART and Muni Metro, is a short walk east. The museum sits across the plaza from City Hall in the old Main Library building.

The museum’s Noh theater woodblock prints are also up through February 2027 and are included with general admission, which makes them an easy addition to the same trip.

Details from the Asian Art Museum’s exhibition page and its current exhibitions listing.

Photo: Beyond My Ken, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.