Park Seo-bo remembered for influence on Korean art scene

Park Seo-bo, who led the movement of dansaekhwa, or Korean monochrome painting, as one of the most influential 20th-century Korean artists, died Saturday morning. He was 91.

Dansaekhwa master Park Seo-bo stands with one of his works from the “late-ecriture period,” in 2021 at Kukje Gallery in central Seoul. [MOON SO-YOUNG]

Park Seo-bo, who led the movement of dansaekhwa, or Korean monochrome painting, as one of the most influential 20th-century Korean artists, died Saturday morning. He was 91.

Park, who was active on social media, revealed on his Instagram account in March that he had been diagnosed with stage 3 lung cancer. He wrote, "Even if I were to die right now, I would be told that I have lived a long life. So I think my time left is a gift. I will spend my time more meaningfully by devoting myself to my work […] I want to draw one more line on the canvas."

“The personal history of Park Seo-bo is the history of Korea’s modern art,” Hongik University Professor Chung Yeon-shim, art historian and author of “Korean Art from 1953: Collision, Innovation, Interaction” (2020), told the Korea JoongAng Daily on Sunday. “During my research, I discovered his involvement in numerous important events in Korean modern art history.”

Chung participated in various projects related to Park, including one centered around the mail correspondence between Park and Kim Tschang-Yeul (1929-2021), who is famous for his so-called water drop paintings. “These letters shed light on the profound friendship shared by the two men, and their close ties with Lee Ufan and Kim Whanki, intricately weaving into the complex tapestry of the Korean art scene and history,” she added.

Artist Park Seo-bo explains one of his works from the “early-ecriture period" at the MMCA Seoul in 2019. [MOON SO-YOUNG]

Park has been admired as a pioneering figure in Korean abstract art and as one of the founders of the dansaekhwa movement, which started in the 1970s and gained international recognition from the 2010s. In dansaekhwa abstract paintings, monastic in nature, the artist scribbles, brushes, rubs or tears a canvas and uses a single or limited colors.

"The aimlessness of the act, the infinite repetitiveness of the act, the mentalization of the material created in the process of the act — these are the elements of dansaekhwa," Park said during his solo show at Kukje Gallery in central Seoul in 2021.

Born in 1931 in Yecheon, North Gyeongsang, Park graduated from Hongik University's department of western art. In 1956, he emerged as a major figure in the Korean art scene by leading the anti-gukjeon (national awards exhibition) movement, denouncing it as an outdated remnant of the Japanese colonial period.

Park Seo-bo's "Primordial No.1-62" (1962) [MMCA]

Until the mid-1960s, he painted abstract paintings that, inspired by the "art informel" movement of France, captured the dark and violent sentiments in the aftermath of the 1950-53 Korean War.

After serving as one of the founding members of the Hyundae Fine Artists Association in 1957, which led to the rise of art informel in Korea, Park participated in the "Young Painters of the World in Paris (Jeunes Peintres du Monde à Paris)" in 1961, developing his “Primordialis” series in the early '60s and then his “Hereditarius” series in the late '60s.

Park started his iconic dansaekhwa paintings, described in the French word ecriture — which translates to handwriting or exercise in English, in the '70s. He was inspired by his young son practicing his handwriting: writing and erasing. He began to apply countless pencil lines to a canvas painted white.

Park Seo-bo's "Ecriture No.01-77"(1977) from the “early-ecriture period" [MMCA]

Then, in the mid-'80s, he began to take a new approach that involves making the most of Korean dakjongi (traditional mulberry paper), through repeated rubbing and scratching. He went from the utterly colorless, early-ecriture works to adding color through the use of wormwood, tobacco and other materials.

Since the mid-'90s, the beginning of the "late-ecriture period," he has removed any traces of the human hand from his works and used sticks, rulers and other tools to create furrow-like spaces at regular intervals while applying deeper, richer colors.

Park was also an educator and promoter of contemporary Korean art. In 1962, he became a professor at Hongik University's College of Fine Arts, where he trained his students and served as dean of the college from 1986-90. In 2000, he was appointed professor emeritus at the same university. He also served as chairman of the Korean Fine Arts Association in the late '70s.

But Park has been criticized for forming and leading a faction of graduates from Hongik University and for wielding enormous power in the local art world.

“He was criticized for forming a collective power and for standardizing contemporary art in Korea, but, at the same time, he maintained artistic integrity,” art historian Kwon Young-jin wrote in the exhibition book for a large-scale retrospective at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) in 2021. That’s why Park, in the press preview of the MMCA retrospective, joked, “I’m often described as if I were a horned goblin. Yes, I came here after shaving my horns during my morning shave.”

Park Seo-bo's painting from the “late-ecriture period" on view at his solo show at Kukje Gallery in central Seoul in 2021. [MOON SO-YOUNG]

Park was full of wit and enthusiasm even in his last years. His late "Ecriture" series, which he showed in his 2021 solo show at Kukje Gallery in Seoul, were inspired by the rich colors of nature such as ripe Korean persimmons, golden olives and Japanese maple tree leaves, as well as the colors of "second nature," or in other words the cityscape, such as the illumination of bridges along the Han River in Seoul. "Nature is my teacher. Human beings are also my teachers,” he said in the press preview of the exhibition.

In the preview, he said with a smile, "I am often moved by my own paintings. Artists have that kind of stupidity. One minute I'm admiring what I've done, and the next I realize it's a gate to hell. One day I'm going to walk through that door."

He added, "Now Kim Tschang-Yeul has passed away. […] There is no one to call. I appeal to my paintings for that."

Park was awarded the 2021 Geumgwan (Gold Crown) Order of Cultural Merit.

His solo show is scheduled to take place in 2024 at the new New York gallery of the London-based White Cube Gallery, whose founder Jay Jopling said he “deeply admires and respects” Park. His works are housed in the collections of renowned institutions all over the globe including at the MMCA in Korea; Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo; Centre Pompidou in Paris; Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi; and M+ in Hong Kong.

BY MOON SO-YOUNG [moon.soyoung@joongang.co.kr]