Insoon Ha

Insoon Ha is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans sculpture, installation, performance, and video. Her work examines how historical violence persists in bodies, spaces, and everyday life long after its visible origin fades. Shaped by histories of displacement and conflict, she approaches violence not as a singular event but as an ongoing condition. It accumulates, repeats, and quietly structures lived experience over time. Her forms are restrained and controlled, yet carry tension beneath their surfaces. Through material resistance, spatial compression, and layered processes, Ha reveals endurance, containment, and gradual erosion rather than rupture or spectacle. Meaning unfolds slowly through duration and accumulation, resisting immediate resolution.

Distance plays a crucial role in Ha’s practice. Working far from her place of origin allows memory to surface obliquely, emerging gradually rather than asserting itself directly. Within this space, inherited conflict and residual force appear not as narrative or image, but as persistent physical and psychological presence.

At Fonderie Darling, Ha creates figurative works that hold the aftershocks of past violence. Her sculptures merge human and animal forms, moving between figuration and abstraction, while complementary drawings extend these forms into hybrid images shaped through process and material transformation. The work develops through quiet accumulation, leaving traces of tension, endurance, and suspended resolution.

Biography

Seoul-born and currently based in Toronto, Canada, Insoon Ha is an artist working primarily in sculpture and installation. Her work has been exhibited at institutions including the Art Gallery of Guelph; Whanki Museum, Seoul; La Centrale Galerie Powerhouse, Montreal; Latitude 53, Edmonton; CEPA Gallery, Buffalo; the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto; A Space Gallery, Toronto; the McMaster Museum of Art; the Art Gallery of Mississauga; the Buffalo AKG Art Museum; and theBlanc Gallery, New York. Ha holds a BFA and MFA in Sculpture from the University of Seoul and an MFA in Fine Arts from the State University of New York at Buffalo. Her practice has been supported by numerous grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council. She has participated in major residencies including The Studios at MASS MoCA; the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP), New York; the Leighton Artist Studios Residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity; and Sculpture Space, New York. Recent and forthcoming solo exhibitions include YYZ Artists’ Outlet, Toronto, and NARS Foundation Gallery, New York.

Recent exhibitions

2025	Dirge, solo exhibition, theBLANC Art Space, NYC, NY, USA Shifting Borders, solo exhibition, Centre[3] fro Artistic + Social Practice, Hamilton, Canada
2023	My Mother's Tongue, group exhibition, Art Gallery of Mississauga, Mississauga, Canada