Ha In-doo was among the young artists who pioneered the 1950s informel movement in Korean contemporary art. Most studies of Ha as an artist, by contrast, begin with works in his series that address religious and other themes, such as “germination” and “humans-love/hatred,” and which date from the early 1970s. This is because Ha"s independent oeuvre is believed to have taken shape from around the latter period onwards. Until now, studies of Ha have tended to regard the time between his informel years and the period in which he produced works embodying Buddhist themes as a kind of vacuum or cut-off. This study is an attempt to reveal the unique, independent sense of form that Ha consistently sought to achieve in the process of embracing various Western artistic trends such as cubism and informalism, during a period that stretched from his early work namely, the 1950sto the 1960s. This study attempts to highlight Ha"s pursuit of “monumentality” as demonstrated by his acceptance of geometric abstraction, as developed from Cezanne to Picasso, in the mid-1950s, and the fascination he showed with the subconsciousness while participating in the informel movement from 1958 onwards, as important factors leading to the search for an inner world that runs through his entire oeuvre.
Ha In-doo managed to reach his own unique interpretation of Cezanne"s paintings and cubism. In his view, Cezanne and cubism were a strong and immutable global symbol that had to be built on the ruins left by the Korean War in the 1950s. Having absorbed a nihilistic, tragic worldview from poet Oh Sang-soon in the 1950s, Ha understood the fundamental desire of sculpture to be the placing of monumental structures on meaningless, fickle reality. The works Ha submitted to the “Cheongmaek Exhibition” in Busan in 1957 well illustrate his pursuit of monumentality.
Ha In-doo jumped straight in the middle of Informal movement in 1958. His work has received a reputation among members that was especially ideological which was due to a deep interest in Surrealism and the automatism. Ha evaluated automatism as a universal language of contemporary art expression to reveal the hidden subconscious. His fascination for automatism has two significant factors. One is exchanges with Korea surrealist poets and the other one is the effect of Japan Informal movement, Gutai. Gutai recognized automatism as a way to Happening. Ha differently saw automatism as a means of recording the inner consciousness. This is the same recognition that understood Cubism in a spirit of trying to establish a Monumental structure.