PARK SEO-BO (1931–2023)
South Korean painter Park Seo-bo, a founder of the minimalist Dansaekhwa movement, died October 14 at the age of ninety-one. The cause was lung cancer, according to the Seoul-based Yonhap News Agency. Park, one of South Korea’s most commercially successful and internationally known artists, first rose to prominence with his “Écritures,” a series of pencil-and-oil works on canvas. Begun in the 1960s, these paintings embodied his fascination with repetitive gestures as a mode of meditation and catharsis, two concepts that fueled his oeuvre for the duration of his career. “[Painting is] like getting water from different sources,” he told the Brooklyn Rail’s Richard Morgan in 2005. “Whether it descends from the mountain and gathers in clay jars or cisterns, water always flows naturally and is able to take the shape and form of whatever contains it. Similarly I want to make something appear as clearly and naturally as water. I want to control my energy as a means of generating ideas and I wish, through my own experience, to make my work without any specific intention.”
Park Seo-bo was born Park Jae-hong on November 15, 1931, in the North Gyeongsang region of South Korea, which was at the time occupied by the Japanese. The third of eight children, he discovered a love of drawing as a boy, but this was frowned upon by his father, an attorney, who wanted him to practice law. Park in 1950 enrolled in the arts program at Hongik University, from which graduated in 1955, having studied under pathbreaking abstractionist Kim Whanki and having endured the outbreak of the Korean War, during which he was forcibly enlisted by first North Korea and then South Korea, at one point selling portraits to US soldiers in order to support himself. Upon graduation, Park changed his name from Jae-hong to Seo-bo in order to escape being drafted yet again.
In 1957, he joined the Contemporary Artists Association, subsequently becoming a key figure in the Korean Art Informel movement, many of whose members would play roles in the development of the postwar form Dansaekhwa, or “monochrome painting.” The Korean Art Informel movement differed from its Western counterpart in its focus on tactile and meditative, rather than visual, qualities. In 1961, Park traveled to Paris to participate in the UNESCO International Young Painters Exhibition, remaining there for twelve months and returning at intervals thereafter for the next several years, during which he gained an interest in Spanish painters Antoni Tàpies and Manolo Millares.
In 1967, Park inaugurated his “Écriture” series after watching his three-year-old son struggle to write on a sheet of gridded paper. Adopting his son’s frustrated scribblings and attendant sense of resignation, Park repeated pencil marks on wet paint to evoke “the hardships of the era, the experience of the war.” Titling the series in French, as he felt the term écriture better expressed his intent than either the corresponding Korean or English term, he pursued it into the 2000s, moving away from the white paint he favored in the earlier works to richer hues.
Apart from his career as a painter, Park was a critic and educator, teaching at Hongik University from 1962 to 1997, and serving as dean of its Faculty of Fine Arts from 1986 to 1990. He won the National Medal of Korea in 1984, and enjoyed the first of many retrospectives of his work, at Seoul’s National Museum of Contemporary Art in 1991. In 2021, he was awarded the Geumgwan Order of Cultural Merit, Korea’s highest cultural merit award. That same year, he established the Gwangju Biennale’s $100,000 Art Prize, which he fully funded with the intent of supporting younger artists. The award was discontinued two years later, after artists of more recent generations protested that Park’s values were out of line with those of the Biennale, which was founded to honor the democratic spirit of the city present in the Gwangju Uprising of 1980. Critics argued that Dansaekhwa, with its focus on the meditative, the minimal, and the natural, ignored the political struggles for democracy amid which it was made.
Park’s work is held in the collection of major institutions around the world, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, both in New York; the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the M+ in Hong Kong. A museum devoted to his work and named for him is slated to open next summer in Seogwipo, on Jeju Island.
“My circumstances have changed since I began, and that means I have also been changed,” he told Morgan. “So even though I have no intention to change, I have discovered that I have changed over time,” he concluded. “It’s inevitable.”
