The artist, Park Seo-Bo, had a polymathic career that spanned stints as an educator, art administrator and producer.  Such creative and intellectual dexterity by Park has left an indelible mark on the history of Korean modern art. This e-book contains a selection of 218 works by Park Seo-Bo, chosen from 2,223 total items which were examined by a research team, each selection based on the piece’s relative importance to a period in his career.  As one of the first comprehensive examinations of Park Seo-Bo’s corpus of work, the method deployed here is designed to offer a fresh and varied perspective on his art, which has thus far been discussed mainly in the context of the existing scholarship and canon formations. For example: “Establishment and Spread of Korean Modernism” or in relation to topics such as the “Modernization of Tradition,” “Handicraft Quality of Korean Art,” “Aesthetics of White,” “Colors and the Spirit of the Time,” and “Koreanness as Opposed to Internationality.”

Works included in this e-book were created over a period of six decades between 1954 and 2014, marked by the first year after the Korean War’s Korean and the Armistice Agreement to the country’s current and firm position as a G-20 techno-modern society of enormous economic, industrial and cultural contribution and power.  Divided into seven smaller epochal periods and based on medium and techniques used by Park, any shift in style or approach is highlighted and analyzed in this collection. For works that have been lost or destroyed or whose current location (collection) cannot be determined, surviving black and white photos, if any, were included for reference purposes. However, in the case of drawings, drawings shown in “Cabinet des Dessins,” Park’s solo exhibition held in 2006-2007, and more particularly those that are considered significant for their relationship to his paintings were also selected for inclusion.

One notable aspect of this e-book is that it is based on the artist’s own massive personal archives, amassed and thus comprised of newspaper and magazine articles, exhibition materials and photos that he had collected throughout his life. These exhaustive personal archives built over a lifetime and meticulously maintained, undoubtedly constitute important source materials, a kind of autoethnographic repository which is not just of value in terms of research into Park’s own art and monochrome painting, but also provides a fresh set of insights into the history of Korean modern art through which he lived. This e-book moreover contains materials related to overseas exhibition activities by Korean modern artists in the 1960s and thereafter, about which very little has been known due to the scarcity of written records and historicized here in remarkable detail. At a time when professional curators did not yet exist in Korea, Park took it upon himself to serve as an exhibition and event producer for Korean art; actively promoting and serving as creative ambassador to artists so that they could be better known abroad, thus laying important foundations via foreign networks which then facilitated artistic exchanges between Korea and the international community. To cast further light on the important role played by Park in expanding the geographical horizons and consumption of Korean art overseas, information was also directly collected in places like France and Japan. This e-book thus makes it possible to understand and appreciate how Park and other members of the new generation of painters that emerged in the late 1950s came to exchange and participate in Anglo-European art scenes abroad and gradually gained visibility there. A varied selection of reference materials, permitting the overview of research into Park’s art and research trends, is also included.

This e-book spans Park’s entire career as an artist. Most existing studies deal only with a specific period of his career, and this is due to the colossal size of his body of work as well as the extensive changes his art underwent over time. Virtually no study has ever attempted to understand Park’s art as part of the whole cultural sphere in Korea, formulated here by examining his aesthetic sensibilities and cultural logic across different periods in his artistic career. Unlike most existing studies that are focused on his Primordialis series, in which the sorrow of a grieving nation in the post-war period is allegorized through this abstract expressionist style via fierce brushwork of art informel  a chapter of Korean modernism in the vein of Picasso’s Guernica; or the Écriture series which is considered the prototype of Korean modernist art, this e-book looks at his whole body of work by dividing his career characterized and based on the rapid and compressed social and cultural environment of a given period.  Of significant note, in addition, is the fact that this book pays close attention to his color theory, an aspect often neglected in the discussions of Park’s works. As such, this publication wishes to understand how his colors choices and discernment would change over time, and how significant colors come to reflect the spirit and mood of a given epoch. By examining Park’s works from the connoisseurship of colors, the book attempts to offer a new perspective on his art’s bold visuality.

As a pathway into more multidisciplinary studies of Korean art history, this e-book is expected to provide information important for building a body of knowledge about Korean modern art as a whole, as well as laying the groundwork for further and more comprehensive research into Park’s corpus of art.  If the book has limitations, they are twofold. First it does not contain any notes personally kept by the artist or letters he had exchanged with fellow artists. The other small deficiency is that it leaves out new artistic attempts made by Park in recent times and his newer works. Future researchers should therefore expand on this e-book, a compendium of results from research thus far made, by contributing new knowledge and insights. It is the hope of the research team that this e-book will serve as a robust basis for research into Korean modern art and that it will be further improved and augmented through future research.

1931 Born in Yecheon, Gyeongsangbuk-do

1954 Graduated from the Department of Painting, Faculty of Fine Arts, Hongik University

1962-1997 Professor, Department of Painting, Hongik Universit

1970-1977 Vice-president of the Korean Art Association

1977-1980 President of the Korean Art Association, Vice-President of the Federation of Korean Art and Culture Organization

1985-1986 Dean, Graduate School of Industrial Art, Hongik University

1986-1990 Dean, College of Fine Arts, Hongik University
1994 Received Okgwan Culture Medal(Level 4), Established Seobo Art Cultural Foundation

2011 Received the Eungwan Cultural Medal(Level 2)

Park Seo-Bo and Contemporary Korean Art: 

The Times Revealed through Color

 Hey-kyung KI

Ⅰ. Introduction

Park Seo-Bo occupies a distinctive position in the history of contemporary Korean art and a small but vital position in the wider global modernist episteme. In addition to his activities as an artist, a professor, and a Korean Fine Arts Association (KFAA) board member, he also made outstanding contributions to the arts community as a cultural planner before the establishment of the curatorial system in the country. Engaging in such diverse areas of the Korean cultural industry and gaining decades of expertise as practitioner, educator and steward of Korean art, the extent of his accomplishments are such that many of the crucial parts of contemporary Korean art history would be impossible to explain without referencing and historicizing his pathbreaking work and career. At a time when the painting community remained split between the dominant genre of academic art on the one hand, represented by the government-sponsored exhibition National Art Exhibition of the Republic of Korea (NAERK), and  on the other hand, the non-conformist and political motivated modernism, the newly emerging Park would engage in activities that would break down the walls between establishment painting circles and those with fierce loyalties to activist causes. These tasks encompassed a grand spectrum of roles for Park; primarily by providing new forums of activity in the Korean art scene by using his art as an avant-garde platform to explore and reveal the sentiment of the epoch, or seeking out alternatives through overseas exhibitions, but also by mentoring emerging artists in aid of the expansion and establishment of contemporary art, and engaging in educational or cultural administrative activities by organizing exhibitions. Indépendent, Contemporary Art Festival and Ecole de Séoul were creative platforms devised and programed by Park. There has been no comprehensive assessment of Park Seo-Bo in all his different guises as artist, educator, planner, and cultural administrator or leader of the art scene. Appraisals have been limited to Park Seo-Bo as artist, and even those discussions have been centered chiefly on his work as an artist. Furthermore, discourse has mainly focused on the Écriture series; no research has encompassed the entirety of his oevre as an avant-garde artist.

Despite the myopic tendency to preference Park’s positionality in Korean art history and not his active creative and social engineering of it, , this paper has been written by drawing extensively on the artist’s digital archive, with added research of his overall oeuvre, to focus on Park’s important contribution to contemporary Korean art history. Described as Korea’s “living embodiment of modern and contemporary art,” Park’s work has served as an honest reflection of the trajectory of the last 60 years of Korean modern and contemporary art. In the years after World War II, amid the influence of abstract expression that was dominating painting around the world, Park Seo-Bo’s informel work revealed the anguish and impoverishment of people who had lived through the tragedies of fratricidal war; as memories of the war faded in the mid-1960s, he experimented with geometric abstraction, amid waves of urbanization and industrialization brough on by Korea’s compressed modernity. Moving beyond the mere question of what drives one to paint, he launched an exploration into the fundamental question of how to paint, completing Écriture and hence realizing his own unique style and ideologically unmoored position. As a representational masterwork in Park Seo-Bo’s expansive oeuvre, Écriture has shown transformations over time in its materiality and its approach to 2-D canvas, forming a foundation for his work as a whole. With scarce literature has truly and comprehensively to date addressed the changes in Park Seo-Bo’s style, which is viewed as having forged a paragon for Korean modernism with its embodiment of an Eastern view of nature and art in painting, this chapter will focus on a more holistic approach and examination of Park’s entire oeuvre. 

Ⅱ. Artistic Experimentation and Changing Form

Park Seo-Bo entered the Eastern painting department of Hongik University before the Korean War, but transferred to Western painting when the Eastern painting professors were unable to travel to the refugee school in Busan. Later, Park would launch his painting career by presenting work under his birth name of Park Jae-hong at the Hongik University School of Art Exposition—a KFAA Exhibition commemorating the fourth anniversary of the Korean War’s outbreak—and the NAERK. His style during this time can be observed in Sunny Spot (1955), currently part of the collection of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea. Here we notice two seated figures of progressively simplified form that are depicted on a canvas dominated by dry textures; each is contoured vis-à-vis an expressively thick and coarse set of lines. Apart from the modernist tendencies on view with the simplified subjects, the work shows considerable differences when compared with the same year’s Woman (1955) by adopting the style of the Shinsashilpa (Neo-Realist Group) that served as a focal point for dissident painters in the 1950s. Woman, which features a woman dressed in traditional Korean hanbok clothing, betrays a Cubist influence that had been adopted by painters at the time, regarding its sharp lines and partitioned canvas. In particular, the deep and clear coloring applied to the bottom of the skirt and to the face and lips infuses the canvas with vitality; this use of color gives a sense of balance and enlivens the canvas, and as a whole can be seen as a reflection of Park’s artistic sensibility towards the use of color, which persists to this day.^[1] At the same time, the fact that Sunny Spot, with its expressive tendencies, was produced in the same year as Woman, which is aligned around an intellectual partitioning of the canvas, reflects the particular situation faced by Korean painters at the time. Prior to Liberation, the Western artistic trends present in Korea represented a version of Western Art adopted by Japan that had entered the country in a limited fashion through Japanese colonial rule. With Korea’s liberation, however, importing channels of art had expanded to become more direct and inclusive, to the point that nearly every Western art trend had been simultaneously introduced to Korean painting by the 1950s, through art journals, foreign press coverage of exhibitions, burgeoning biennales, and sojourners coming in, ushering in a period of exploration. It could be said that the simultaneous embodiment of expressionist and intellectual trends, which would have been incompatible in the formative logic of Western art history, was only made possible due to the fact that Western art trends had been adopted as a means of formal artistic experimentation rather than being founded within an understanding of formative principles; this is a trend that can be seen not only in the stylistic tendencies of Park Seo-Bo at this time, but also through the works of many of his contemporaries. In this sense, the 1950s may be described as a period of exploration, both for Park Seo-Bo and for the Korean art scene.

Ⅲ.  The Ravages of War and “Black Abstraction”

In terms of Korean art history, the late 1950s was a period of change, in which artists—mainly dissidents and those of the younger generation— explored new styles that could express their newfound position within history. Yet, the sole gateway to the art world at the time, the government-sponsored NAERK, which dominated the mainstream art scene, was governed by a trend of academic realism, and visible fractures had started to surface, revealing longstanding fractures within the community.^[2] Such internal struggles of the NAERK provided both the modernist-leaning dissidents who distanced themselves from these circles, and the newly emerging group of younger artists with an opportunity to counter its influence. During this time, Park Seo-Bo joined Moon Woo-sik, Kim Chung-seon, and Kim Young-hwan in forming the Four-Man Exhibition and organizing an anti-NAERK declaration. Through the anti-NAERK declaration, he denounced the NAERK as an “idol-like establishment” as having “massacred the establishment” and being manifested by “a resolute cynicism to exterminate” and he called for “a clearing away of all existing ideas” with a “spirit of devastation”.[3] These statements offer a glimpse of Park’s avant-garde approach as he rebelled against the existing art establishment. Despite the zeitgeist and the avant-garde consciousness through the anti-NAERK declaration, however, the work presented by Park Seo-Bo in his actual exhibitions did not diverge greatly from his previous style. Nevertheless, the fact that emerging artists who had just started to emerge on the art scene in the late 1950s were challenging the NAERK’s authority and spearheading a statement of rebellion was significant enough to signal that the art world would soon be swept with an entirely different atmosphere.^[4]

On the other hand, it can be said that Park Seo-Bo’s style truly began to show a major transformation with the third Korea Association of Modern Art (KAMA) exhibition in 1958,^[5] And at this time the exhibition was evaluated a harbinger of “avant-garde activities by a young generation marching towards the latest advancements, proclaiming its avant-garde identity and professing a rejection of form.”^[6] Park Seo-Bo’s submissions for this exhibition were Painting No.1, Painting No.2, and Painting No.3. Among the three, Painting No.1 has often been compared to the dripping work of Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) due to its external similarities. While Park himself has cited that he had been influenced by informel, as an art form that had just entered the country,“ on the soles of the military boots of American soldiers,”[7] Park’s work, however, leans more heavily towards the elimination of form than the method of paint dripping, and can be distinguished from Pollock’s work through the rubbed, wiped, and erased markings of paint that fill the canvas. At the same time, the use of vibrant yellow, red, and orange tones in parts of the black-dominated Painting No.1 convey a sense of rhythm to the canvas. Such flamboyant use of color as a means to infuse vitality to the canvas is a reflection of Park Seo-Bo’s artistic sensibility as carried over from the preceding period. The work represented by Painting No.1 has been described as informel,^[8] and this informalism would soon rapidly circulate within the Korean art scene, chiefly among the younger generation.^[9]

Such stylistic tendencies from Park’s work in the late 1950s would soon change during his sojourn in Paris, where he spent a year preparing for the “Paris exposition for young artists around the world.” Whereas his work as represented by Painting No.1 had revealed greater affinity to the  drip/pour paintings by Jackson Pollock from the American form of abstract expressionism,^[10] Park’s canvases from this time in Paris reveal a transition toward the European informel trend, which emphasized matière with its use of viscous matter and non-artistic and everyday materials. Known as the Primordialis series, Park’s work from this period adopted methods such as burning everyday objects onto the canvas or using a knife to roughly apply pigment. Characterized by raised outlines that almost appear to have been created in relief, this period’s work was completed through a process of layering forms on the canvas and then whittling them down or sweeping them away with a palette knife, or applying the matière by attaching a burlap sack to the surface to partially form vent-like holes.^[11] Through this process, the manufactured black forms slowly emerge against a black backdrop, as if to depict a wounded human figure. Dominated by viscous mucilage, marks of tearing and scorching on disfigured human forms, densely and roughly applied paint layers, and the color black, the canvases could be described as veracious depiction of a landscape in the wake of violence.

At the same time, the black that dominates the artist’s canvases from this period can easily be discovered not only in Park Seo-Bo’s work but in Kim Yeong-ju’s April Revolution-themed Black Sun and black, Chung Chang-Sup’s Ecosystem of Black, and the works of Yoon Myeong-ro.^[12] This phenomenon, which was uncovered by emerging artists that emerged with a sense of rebellion against the existing establishment while expressing the zeitgeist of a post-war environment, presents black as a color that posseses a social and cultural significance beyond its role as a formative element in art. Indeed, Oh Kwang-su has said of the black that dominates the Primordialis series’s canvases that “the black skin is the most fitting expression of the devastating, extreme situations of those who had survived the horrors of war: a generation represented by a cry of silence, of vomiting blood.”^[13] Park Seo-Bo himself has said that his work during this period were “the living products of self-deprecation accumulated from massacres, sacrifices found in times of collective violence, ideological persecution, injustice, anxiety, isolation and a bleak pervading sense of helplessness. ” ^[14] Critiques of Park’s Primordialis series at the time used terms like “images of howling humans,” “the wails of the dying,” and “adepiction of mankind gasping for life with acrid breath.”^[15] The Primordialis series was seen as a manifestation of existential awareness and as an inquisition into human dignity as witnessed in the extremities of war.^[16] In this sense, the black that dominates the canvases of the Primordialis series extends beyond the sadness, loneliness, and grief typically connoted by black tones to serve as a mechanism rooted in existentialism that reveals a resistant, futile situation, while symbolically unraveling questions about humanity’s penchant toward barbarism. Beyond that devastating verdict about war-torn twentieth century, it may also be seen as the mourning cries of a generation that experienced war firsthand, a metaphor of remonstration against the world and the elite establishment, and a symbol of the despair and sense of loss experienced in the recurring scars of tragic fratricidal violence, as well as the struggle, in spite of everything, to survive.

Ⅳ.  Geometric Abstraction and Pop Meet Obangsaek Colors

Throughout the early to mid-1960s, South Korea became imbibed with a sense of optimism regarding modernization through industrialization, emboldened by the success of the first Economic Development Plan. Additionally, a hopeful and futuristic discourse of city and society was spreading to bolster the recent advent of urbanization and industrialization.[17] The grim memories of war were slowly beginning to fade, replaced by a sense of anticipation for the new era to come. Informel abstraction and lyrical abstraction had outlived its usefulness in the art scene, and calls for the development of a formative vocabulary to reflect the spirit of the newly arriving times started to emerge in response to the stimulus of the Paris Biennale events of 1963 and 1965. The Paris Biennale at this time was dominated by the prominence of British pop art such as the work of Allen Jones (1937)–), French nouveau réalisme, and op art as exemplified by Bridget Riley (1931–), with the emergence of a plethora of experimental and conceptual styles.^[18] This significant change in Western art trends, along with the transformations in South Korea’s social and cultural environment led to demand for a new formative vocabulary.

The period also signified a period of major change for Park Seo-Bo. If the informel art movement had purposefully addressed internal issues resulting from war, then the movements of this era were directed more externally than introspectively, seeking to meet with the rhythms of change and those of which were transpiring in the international art community.^[19] In particular, the currents of the 1963 and 1965 Paris Biennale events, which were both directly and indirectly related to these changes, also functioned as an impetus for change in Park’s work.^[20] If it had been black that had dominated Park’s canvases in the early 1960s, yellow and red tones now began surface in its stead, as can be observed in Primordialis No.18-64 and Primordialis No.21-65. In particular, the outlines of Primordialis No.21-65 featured elements that almost seemed to have been cut into place, accompanied by greater prominence of light colors, thinner layers of paint, and drawn elements. These changes were made in accordance with a shift in Park Seo-Bo’s awareness,^[21] that global art in the post-informel era was starting to accommodate “compromises between industrial technology and artistic form, mass communication-style editing art, and a perceptive treatment of the canvas.”^[22] This reveals the artist’s awareness of the kinetic, Op art, and Pop art tendencies that had begun establishing themselves as currents in global painting. The changes in the contemporary social environment and the need for a new formative language to meet such changes manifested itself through a stylistic transition from abstraction to conception, from expressionism to the geometric, and from a thematic focus on the scars of war to a pop approach rooted in popular culture.

The changing tendencies of Park’s work during this time are significant as a body of work which reflects the emergence of his consciousness regarding traditional Korean culture. In the late 1960s, the artist developed an interest in shamanism, attempting a modern adaption of shamanist and folk art rooted in “what could be seen as gutnori [exorcism play], sinpuri[spirit summoning], or seonghwangdang [sacred shrine].”^[23] Exemplified by the Muje (Shamanist Festival) exhibition,^[24] these efforts formally sought to adopt new trends in Western art that had started to gain prominence in the Paris Biennale, while capturing thematically Korean content. This awareness and exploration of tradition shown by Park Seo-Bo in this era appears to have been deeply associated with the cultural policies of the Park Chung-hee administration. Park Chung-hee’s administration, who had taken control of the government through a coup d’état, embarked on an active role in cultural policy to secure the legitimacy of the military regime. These cultural policies went beyond passive attempts that would have produced a taxidermy-like state-controlled culture or a depoliticized public. The Park administration’s cultural policy entailed active leadership by the government to promote nationalism and national culture discourse as governing ideologies, as represented by the campaign to erect statues of patriotic martyrs.^[25] This interference had both direct and indirect effects on contemporary painters, leading to a marked increase in the use of national and traditional subject matter, for example, dancheong(a form of multicolored paintwork) and Buddhist imagery in statues.^[26] Motifs addressed in the previous period at the juncture between colonialism and nationalism were now beginning to be understood as an urtext of the religious nature of Korea, or a source of creative energy in Korean culture.^[27] The movement to “promote national culture” devised and presented as a means of boosting the military administration’s legitimacy thus dominated the social and cultural climate and led to discourse on how East Asian and national culture might be restored as a means to overcome the prominence of Western culture.^[28] Such a social and cultural atmosphere motivated Park Seo-Bo to actively explore folk elements in the mid-1960s,^[29] resulting in a mix of vibrant colors—centering on the obangsaek hues of red, blue, yellow, white, and black—combined with geometric formative elements or figurative art that can be interpreted along pop lines.

The Hereditarius series encompasses a broad scope of artistic styles, ranging from geometric abstraction, figurative art with pop-like elements, and even sculptural installation. Such diversity demonstrated by the artist in less than a decade shows that the artist was personally experiencing a process of exploration in response to the new epoch. To begin with, Hereditarius No.1-68 and Hereditarius No.4-68, both produced in the mid to late 1960s, featured traditional obangsaek colors combined with geometric abstraction forms. With primary colors of red, blue, and yellow, these works are flamboyant and decorative, yet the partitioning of their canvases are also instilled with a high level of restraint. Reflective of the desire to transcend the urgency of the informel era and to recognize the advent of a new world, these works feature design elements with flamboyant hues, rather than traits of fine art, characterized by geometric abstraction in their composition and accompanied by a sense of pursuing expressive lyricism and tradition in their use of color.^[30] The series was submitted for the exhibition, Contemporary Korean Painting (National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, July 19–September 1, 1968), the first exhibition held in Japan since the normalization of diplomatic relations between Japan and South Korea, but appears to have been all but well received in Japan.^[31] The artist personally deferred several solo exhibitions during this time, perhaps due to a sense of dissatisfaction regarding his method of using subject matter and motifs to associate with tradition. Directly after, Park attempted to unveil a new transformation in his Hereditarius series. Works such as Hereditarius No.6-69 and Hereditarius No.7-69-70, produced in the late 1960s, differed from his previous use of geometric abstraction with a clear emergence of concreteness in human forms and a gradual departure from the obangsaek hues in terms of color. Using the spray-method, pop-art like tones are revealed on sleek canvases. As seen in reviews of Park’s 1970 solo exhibition that included phrases such as “diverse, vibrant and strong op art primary colors and technically practiced lines,” “images of illusion with clothes alone and no people,” and “geometric composition, or a corner of reality captured from a modern perspective,”^[32]and his own evaluation of having “created works in the form of montage, in which abstract and realism are intertwined (…) using themes acquired from the news about murderers, kidnappers, satellites,”[33] the artist himself used vibrant colors to present modern popular culture and the modern people living in that era, through a format that mixed nouvelle figuration, op art and pop art. Of the works produced during this period, the Heosang(Illusion) Hereditarius series,^[34] with its images of substance less but multi-dimensional human forms, replaces the sense of existential introspection of mankind found in the cold mechanisms of the Primordialis series.^[35] Later, the work would be presented at the 1970 Osaka Expo’s Korea pavilion at the request of Kim Swoo-geun, with dozens of pieces soaring toward the sky under the title Space of Emptiness/Genes and Space. In terms of content, the work was inspired by the 1969 moon landing of and the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey directed by Stanley Kubrick (1928–1999); in terms of form, it was inspired by the work of George Segal (1924–2000). Using the technique of spray painting, pop tendencies were displayed with clear contours and sleek finishing as it expressed the mechanical aesthetic of industrial society and the weightlessness of the Space Age.^[36] These works were irregularities in terms of the speed with which they were produced, and embodied the artist’s perceptions about the advent of scientific advancements, industrial society and mankind that inhabited this era.

Ⅴ.  Questioning Painting, Painting as Cultivation: Early Écriture[37]

Park Seo-Bo is an artist who has continuously occupied himself with the question of how to approach art. If the works in the Hereditarius series explored the questions of “how to paint” and “what to paint”, the Écriture series focused on the fundamental essence of painting of “how" to paint, rather than “what” to paint. It was this awareness on part of the artists about his approach to art, or process itself, while inquiring how to relate to tradition during the past Hereditarius series, which drove him to adopt a modernist stance on the one hand, while allowing his work to possess elements that diverge from modernism on the other. Écriture, which resulted from a process of questioning “how” to draw, became the backbone of Park Seo-Bo’s body of work, under the title which signifies “how to draw” as if one were writing words.^[38]

Early Écriture works involved applying white paint to the canvas and using a pencil to draw on top of it; this approach is often called “pencil écriture” or “early écriture.” These works, which use pencil to draw lines on paint, may be described as products of constant repetition. Pencil Écritures may be categorized according to the condition of the paint and the control of lines, as seen in Écriture No.1.72-73, the earliest examples of which feature repeated lines slanting in unison against a backdrop of lined or latticed framework after the paint applied to the canvas had dried. Thereafter, lines were drawn before the paint had dried, as in Écriture No.15-76, gradually resulting in more free-form lines and the accumulation of pigment that had been pushed away by the pressure of the pencil on the canvas. Park’s canvases now possessed more substance than existing as a mere painting; rather, the canvases started to become a place of action, on which the artist’s actions met with the wet pigment, exposing the accumulated remnants of a physical phenomenon, which in turn added structure to the canvas.^[39] Such methods would be layered upon the canvas through the repeated application of pigment and the drawing of rhythmical and flexible lines on the canvas, which reflected the breath and rhythmical movement of the artist, as seen in Écriture No.41-78(1978). Against this backdrop, the lines were compiled as multiple layers and were absorbed into the canvas.

The central elements of Park Seo-Bo’s pencil Écriture work in the 1970s may therefore be characterized as white paint on canvas and the repeated actions performed by the artist. The artist, who had sought to explore the fundamental nature of drawing, would later describe the method he had found through the question of “how” to paint as that of his “resignation” to such a mechanical methodology and use of color theory. This approach, which he apparently realized while watching a child practicing writing, alludes to an approach of erasing and emptying rather than supplementing when making art;^[40] and this approach therefore clearly reflected in his gradual progression from drawing after the pigment has dried from early pencil Écritures to drawing before the paint had dried a sense of totality, where the canvas spoke to the purity of color and form. In other words, he was committing to a process of pushing away and erasing the paint with the act of drawing on it while it had not dried, rather than applying even more pencil lines to the surface by drawing on dry paint– this in itself embodies an attitude of resignation. Such a process of resignation in which the artist removes and empties, rather than adding by drawing, can be associated with the process of cultivation to empty the mind of clearing away and seeking a path. To borrow the terminology of Lee Ufan, this structuring of the canvas through ascetic and repetitive actions can be interpreted as a case in which it is the repetitive actions themselves that give rise to the work’s structure. What had once been a material support for the painting is now transformed into a meeting place, a place of union for the artist’s repeated physical acts.[41]

On the other hand, it is also interesting to observe the changes in the artist’s perceptions through his early Écriture work. To begin with, Park remarked ahead of a 1973 solo exhibition that he had been inspired to create Écriture by drawing countless straight lines on a canvas, in a similar fashion to the potters of the Joseon Dynasty who spun their wheels in a state of non-action.^[42] In this, the artist may be seen as identifying his own repetitive working method with the wuwei (non-doing) actions of Joseon potters. But in a 1977 interview, he would declare, “I am not an opponent of color. Am I not rejecting multicolor at the same time? That is not as much as due to my interest in color and in adopting a relatively anti-color attitude than it is because my interest in painting lies outside of color. If I were to respond to the question ‘why paint white paintings?’ it would be to reflect a humble way to perceive nature.”^[43] While in some sense, such a change in perception would be an extension to his response in 1973, this response also shows that his focus was expanding to encompass the color white as a repeated act of non-doing as well as that which implies a view of nature.

This change appears to have been greatly influenced by the 1975 Tokyo Gallery exhibition titled Five Korean Artists: Five Kinds of White (Tokyo Gallery, May 6-24, 1975). This exhibition adopted a Japanese perspective in reconfiguring the new art trends taking place in Korean painting. Tokyo Gallery president Yamamoto Takashi (山本孝, 1920-1988) who organized the exhibition, had visited South Korea three or four times in the year after diplomatic relations with Japan were normalized, purchasing large numbers of ancient works of pottery, folk art, wood furniture, and portraiture, along with works by modern Korean Oriental painters such as Lee Sang-beom and Byeon Gwan-sik. In the process, Yamamoto sensed that Koreans—as a research report published by the Joseon Government-General during the Japanese occupation noted—not only possessed an outstanding sense of color for the use of white, but had inherited that sense from Joseon Dynasty white porcelain and had applied it to their modern art, a perception that he used as a basis for planning Five Korean Artists.^[44] Strongly influenced by the white aesthetic and the simple view of nature exemplified in the folk art aesthetic of Yanagi Muneyoshi (柳宗悅1889-1961),^[45] the exhibition featured an approach that can be verified through an article that was published in its exhibition brochure, which ushered in an active discussion on white in connection with Korean tradition. Through the article in the exhibition pamphlet, Lee Yil names white as the spirit, the universe, and nature for the Korean people. He identifies it as something more than a simple color to Koreans, something that existed as a spirit before it was a color. Going further, he explains that it signifies the universe ahead of being in color, and that it is for this reason that white possesses significance equivalent to nature to the Korean people.^[46] In other words, such discourse, in which Lee saw white as capturing a Korean perspective on nature and spirituality ahead of its being perceived as a color, can also be found in a similar form in the writings of another contributor to the brochure Nakahara Yusuke (中原佑介, 1931-2011).[47] Such a perspective, which was brought into the forum of discourse between Korean and Japan through this exhibition, later provides an opportunity to re-examine the claim that white is associated with Korean tradition.

The exhibition, which has been recorded as the most successful overseas exhibition in the history of contemporary Korean art, resulted in monochrome painting, as exemplified by the color white, establishing itself firmly in the mainstream of 1970s-era contemporary Korean art. Moreover, white not only became officially established as a formative element, but further as a color that represented Korean emotions and national character and captured a Korean perspective on nature. Amid this climate, Park Seo-Bo’s Écriture diverged from the artist’s early works to further emphasize the aspect of white in terms of its national significance and symbolism.^[48] This change, from emphasizing actions to emphasizing color, was not only present in the work of Park Seo-Bo; rather, it can be seen as a framework that can be more generally applied to the works of artists dubbed as “monochrome” who were active in the 1970s. As a result, despite the fact that most monochrome works sought empty the mind and emphasized the artist’s repetitive asceticism, due to the art world of the time focusing more on the use of a single color as an outcome of their body of work, the works eventually became classified as “dansaek” or “monochrome.”

The transition from the early approach that emphasized an emptying …. Through this mode of making it sought  to reinforce the notion of white as a color that embodies the sense of national identity and the view of nature, as well as the feat of dubbing this “monochrome” allows insight into the cultural cartography of Korean society in the 1970s. The Third Republic, a military dictatorship, generously supplied funds to the field of arts and culture according to the Culture and Arts Revival Plan to secure legitimacy for their rule, and within such movements, national history academia, deployed to promote the overcoming of a colonial view of history was accompanied by a heightened interest in tradition.[49] It was at this time that the art field was also filled with discourse on how tradition may be modernized, and these discussions concluded more so in favor of a methodological approach as to “how” tradition may be revived rather than towards use of traditional themes within art; the primary group of artists who came to such a conclusion can be seen as the artists who belonged to what has today become known as “Dansaekwha” artists. Furthermore, the method that they discovered was to put forth the issue of seeking the way and emptying the mind through constant repetition. However, such a group identity was thought to have focused on color rather than on action due to the interpretation of the Japanese art scene, which was more familiar with the colonial view of cultural history as represented by the aesthetic of the Josun Dynasty, as presented by Yanagi Muneyoshi. Such a distorted view of this transition was in the same thread of thought as those who had positively evaluated the cultural historical interpretations of Yanagi Muneyoshi until the 1970s, and this can also be seen as a result of the circumstances of the domestic art scene, which prioritized foreign critics above those from Korea.

Ⅵ . Discovering Hanji^[50]: Late Écriture

The use of hanji (Korean paper) may be viewed as the standard for dividing Park Seo-Bo’s Écriture series into early and late periods. As he newly discovered the materiality of the hanji medium, Park began exploring new realms in his Écriture series. The pivotal moment in his discovery of hanji—thus announcing the start of his late Écriture—came when, at the suggestion of Kurosaki Akira (1937–), he submitted his work for the exhibition The Art of Modern Paper: Korea and Japan (National Museum of Contemporary Art, Dec. 13–27, 1982), which was organized to share the superior qualities and ancient tradition of Eastern paper.^[51] To be sure, he had been aware of hanji’s potential from the work of Kwon Young-woo, who had submitted work for Five Korean Artists, but the direct application of this traditional paper to his work is said to have started since preparing for his exhibition,^[52] when hanji was being re-conceptualized as an art form, which took place based on the nationalist discourse of the 1970s which further provided a fundamental base for this work.

Throughout the 1970s and the 1980s, Korean society experienced a rapid period of industrialization and urbanization through the consecutive successes of the Five-Year Economic Development Plans. Within such waves of change, parts of Korean society committed itself to undertaking the task of self-reflection to define Korean identity, and in lieu with the administration’s national revival policies, the art world also undertook the task of aestheticizing hanji as traditional paper. In particular, hanji’s characteristic of absorbing and integrating paint (unlike Western paper) was understood as a pure expression of Koreans’ perspective on nature and their desire to live as part of it. Furthermore, hanji’s permeability to light and sound was further understood as possessing the symbolic significance of nature and of the earth as a mother that embraces and gives birth to all.^[53]As such, the art world at the time was developing hanji as a material that revealed the national identity within the socio-cultural atmosphere of revival of tradition, and it was within this cultural atmosphere that Park Seo-Bo was able to experiment with the medium.

Early works by Park after transitioning to hanji as a material shows some similarity to his pencil Écriture pieces, which had been drawn with pencil on oil paint. Unlike the pencil Écriture, however, the use of hanji resulted in the pencil being restrained from achieving free-form lines when faced with the resistance of moistened paper. The result, as seen in the canvas of Écriture No.136-83 (1983), is a mass of halted strokes and displaced material. For this reason, the works using hanji contrast with the pencil Écriture pieces, which prominently feature a consciousness of the act of drawing, in that the contestation between the act of drawing and the material appears to be almost desperately fierce.^[54] This material quality of hanji led the artist to attempt new experiments, as seen in Écriture No.11-83 (1983), so that the hanji work, which manifested itself on the canvases in a disorderly manner throughout the early 1980s, began establishing a regular order on the canvas commencing from the mid-point of the decade. It was by this time that, as in Écriture No.352-86 (1986), the images produced through repetitive action formed short, fragmented comb-tooth patterns and “all-over” canvases, which started to reveal directionality and a sense of rhythm. Where Park’s work in the first half of the 1980s, when he first began using hanji, was an extension of his pencil line drawing that revealed the tensions existing between the act of drawing and the material, it was at this point that the artist began making artwork that revealed the repetitive motion of the hands pushing the paper on the canvas, and of the marks left behind as a result. Hanji thus functioned not only as a background but as a mechanism for integrating ceaselessly repeated acts into a canvas structure, uniting the background and painting act as one.

The works of this period, which announced the beginning of the zigzag Écriture pieces, also frequently exhibit a change of colors used on the canvas. Such change was made possible by forgoing oil-based paints, instead opting for water-based paints so that the hanji’s characteristics would appear intact. Where the early Écriture work had chiefly used white oil paints on the canvas, the artist began using natural colors made from a mixture of mugwort, jangsuyeon tobacco, and ink for the hanji paper, mixed with chalk to adjust the tone.^[55] Applied to the canvas with the hanji, the water-based paints and chalk do not merely sit on the surface but, by taking advantage of the paper’s permeability and absorbing qualities, seep into it and unite as matière upon the canvas produced by the artist’s repetitive actions.^[56] Such a result is possible because of hanji’s unparalleled flexibility and self-regulation as a material. The artist takes advantage of this characteristic of the paper to approach the canvas through the medium of repetitive action, so that his movements and the material quality of the paper unite and blend together in the work.^[57]As a result, hanji itself became both a supporting body and a form of expression, rendering a space in which the actions of the artist and the physical qualities of the paper are united.

With the use of hanji, as seen in Écriture No.890503-3 (1989), Park Seo-Bo’s canvases start to feature the formation of a grid structure of certain dimensions. Due to the nature of the work, in which pressure must be applied while the hanji is saturated with water, the hanji was moderated according to the size of the planned artwork, resulting in a grid-like formation on the canvas that would allow the artist to work over set periods of time. This characteristic arising from the working process not only permits an observation of the trajectory and process of the artist’s actions, but also reveals the accumulation of time on the canvas. Time accumulated as such reveals that artistic creation has been elevated to the realm of spiritual cultivation, through the endlessly repeated actions embodying empty the mind. This is a process of nullifying the artist’s own existence into a transparent state, thus reflecting the Korean perspective on nature and its total acceptance of that nature,^[58] and it may also be described as a realm in which material, production method, and resulting work are purposefully combined. Additionally, this may also be seen as an illustration of the artist, amid his explorations into the inherent question of how to paint, taking a step back from Western-style modernism and its presupposition of separation between subject and object and reflecting the Korean perspective of nature and oneness of subject and object through the act of non-action, not only transcending and overcoming the boundaries of modernism, but also elevating artistic creation into a process of internal cultivation. Through this characteristic aesthetic, Park Seo-Bo not only distinguished himself from Western monochrome, but also established a paragon of Korean-style modernism.^[59]

Around the year 1990, Park Seo-Bo’s canvases began moving away from their complex zigzag patterns toward a realm of simplified line composition, as seen in Écriture No.950325 (1995). The works of this time, which are commonly known as ‘line’ Écriture, was a modification of the production method used in the previous period’s zigzag Écriture pieces - his approach involved moistening the hanji with paint and then applying a technique of scratching with a stick so that the straight lines would appear to pop out of the surface, producing an irregular appearance of long and thick lines on the canvas. The repetitive act of pushing resulted in valleys forming on the canvas where the hanji was pushed aside, and prominent lines formed by the by-products displaced by those valleys—lines that construct the entirety of the canvas in a vertical band. Furthermore, works produced in this period appear more refined and ascetic in terms of the shapes on the canvas and the use of color. The condensation and interweaving of textures are reduced, while the all-over, repetitive quality of the vertical patterns adds to a sense of strictness. Only the pure nature of the repetitive act remains on the canvas, imparting a sense of that which has been drawn and at the same time undrawn, undrawn and at the same time drawn.^[60] It is also a state reflected in the drawings produced by the artist when he began his vertical band works.^[61] Where the previous period’s work had been based on spontaneous pencil drawing or involved a zigzag structuring of the canvas through pushing of the hanji while considering its relationship with its surroundings, now the canvases were created and built through thoroughly planned drawings. This characteristic seen in Park’s line-drawing hanji work since the 1990s may appear similar, but having been produced according to a carefully established plan following a prior concept, it both demonstrates harmony and refinement, where, despite the thorough planning, only the purity of the repetitive act remains on the canvas. At the same time, the tones of the color on the canvas were once again neutralized during this period. While there are some experiments with color tone in a few pieces, the work produced during this time consists almost entirely of black and mono tones, as in Écriture No.960315, Écriture No.961117, and Écriture No.990901. The black that dominates the canvases is a color derived from nature,^[62] possessing a depth created through accumulation over the passage of time. As with the color of traditional Korean ink meok, which is seen as containing the five colors of the universe, the black tones used by Park Seo-Bo is not simply black, but an abyss-like black that absorbs the light and air around it. As such, works of this time are governed by a profound shade of black and strict vertical lines, transforming his canvases into a space guided by rhetorical reverence and solemnity.

By the 2000s, Park Seo-Bo’s canvases started to abandon their previous sedateness and neutrality and had transformed to encompass a much brighter and broader spectrum of color. Écriture No.040603 and Écriture No.060320 use contrasting colors on their background canvas and protruding vertical lines. Such compositions on the canvas displays different effects according to the viewer’s perspective. While his canvases display different effects according to different perspectives, as if one were observing a work of op art, it can be said that his work produces a visual effect containing a natural quality and a softness close to nature, rather than being attributed to strictly calculated optical illusions. Such a profound effect, which leads one to stop in front of the aesthetically delicate canvas which emits natural and soft qualities to the observer is due to having used ruggedness and two-tone colors, and the artist has explained that the works from this period are the “colors of healing”[63] taken from nature. Hence, if the colors in earlier times were associated with the social or cultural context that they embodied, now more than in any other period, the artist has attuned his colors with a focus on the beauty that the canvas possesses itself. Through this, his work expresses the artist’s humble hope of offering solace and shelter to wounded moderns in a digitized world.

Ⅶ. . Conclusion

During the preparations for Park Seo-Bo’s retrospective at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, Minemura Toshiaki commented generally  that Park “creates abstract painting for the Asian people, which is distinct from modern European and American painting from its very founding spirit.”[64] His view was that Korean modernist painting, which originated out of an incorporation of a veritable flood of Western trends in the 1950s, had succeeded in producing a truly different method of modernism distinct from that of the West but also part of the multitude of global modernisms. Park Seo-Bo’s efforts in exploring the question of how to paint and the issue of carrying on tradition from a modernist stance have succeeded in overcoming the bounds of modernism and have been reviewed as having secured an identity of their own. Starting from a Western modernism that thoroughly separates subject from object to achieve “art for art’s sake,” Park investigates the method for “how to paint” by tuning into the society and epoch which he faces, both attempting to inherit tradition and possess a contemporary artistic language. As Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) has said, however, tradition is created anew the moment it is discussed by whichever actor it is who mentions it. It is therefore crucial to inquire as to whom and for what purpose something is being called “tradition.” Examined through this lens, if the tradition defined by Park Seo-Bo in his Hereditarius series of the 1960s emphasized the aspect of obangsaek colors through folklore, his Écriture series of the 1970s culminates in repetitive actions encompassing a Taoist approach of drawing away and emptying the mind. However, such asceticism emphasized by the artist is subjected to being understood in association with the aesthetic of white interpreted along the lines of Yanagi Muneyoshi, allowing for a reassessment of the issues presented by the contextualization of culture. From the 1980s, the artist would transform the very material in his work into traditional hanji paper, focusing slightly more on asceticism while using water-based paints taken from nature to embody a realm of oneness between subject and object, where the very actions applied on the canvas are integrated with its structure. Park’s works now achieve a realm where he uses color in the context of a relationship with the times—sometimes to symbolize wounded postwar souls, otherwise as a medium to show national and folk culture, and again elsewhere to show a non-attached attitude towards color, or as part of an approach toward greater kinship with nature. In this sense, Park Seo-Bo may be seen as using color as a medium to reflect the times, or as a theme for the modernization of tradition, or as a symbol to reveal national identity. As a result, Park Seo-Bo has been able to propose a form of Korean modernism different to that of the West, made possible by a method in which the artist, while sharing the basic framework of modernism, also continues to redefine his own style within an ongoing relationship to his times.

1931 Born in Yecheon, Gyeongsangbuk-do

1954 Graduated from the Department of Painting, Faculty of Fine Arts, Hongik University

1962-1997 Professor, Department of Painting, Hongik Universit

1970-1977 Vice-president of the Korean Art Association

1977-1980 President of the Korean Art Association, Vice-President of the Federation of Korean Art and Culture Organization

1985-1986 Dean, Graduate School of Industrial Art, Hongik University

1986-1990 Dean, College of Fine Arts, Hongik University
1994 Received Okgwan Culture Medal(Level 4), Established Seobo Art Cultural Foundation

2011 Received the Eungwan Cultural Medal(Level 2)