Yang-ha

Yang Ha (b. 1994, South Korea) is a visual artist whose practice explores the uneasy space between collective trauma and personal expression. She received her MFA in Painting (cum laude) from the Frank Mohr Institute, Netherlands (2021) and her BFA in Fine Arts from Ewha Womans University, Seoul (2018). She is currently an artist-in-residence at Billytown in The Hague.

Working primarily in painting, Yang Ha fuses cartoon-like motifs with painterly abstraction, creating images that oscillate between playfulness and unease. Clouds, explosions, and teddy bears recur as fragile yet unsettling symbols—pointing to violence, vulnerability, and resistance in a world that is both absurdly beautiful and deeply fractured. Built through thin layers of pastel tones and translucent veils, her works reflect the way violence is consumed, diluted, and reimagined through media. Rather than reconstructing specific events, she isolates and decontextualizes fragments of imagery, reworking them into clumsy, childlike gestures that resist conventional narrative. This deliberate dissonance becomes a mode of protest in itself—sarcastic yet sincere, fragile yet defiant.

Yang Ha has twice been a finalist for the Royal Award for Modern Painting (Amsterdam) and has received development grants from the Mondriaan Fonds and the OCI Museum Young Creativities Award. She has presented solo exhibitions at Unit 1 Gallery | Workshop, London (2024), Wooson Gallery in Daegu, the OCI Museum of Art, Seoul (2023), Sahngup Gallery, Seoul (2022), and H47, Leeuwarden (2021). Her work has also exhibited at Art Rotterdam - Prospect 2024, NAP+ Amsterdam, Kiaf SEOUL, This Art Fair, among others.

Her works are part of public and private collections, including the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) – Art Bank, Seoul, and the OCI Museum of Art, among others.