Park Seo-Bo, the Korean artist known for his Écriture series (1967) has died. Park was one of the leading figures in contemporary Korean art, widely acknowledged as the father of the Dansaekhwa movement of Korean monochrome paintings. Born in 1931, Park was studying Western and Oriental painting at Hongik University when the Korean War broke out. Much of his early work from the 1950s responded to the conditions of war, violence and depravity, and he also had to learn to make canvas frames from scraped together, found objects.
In the early 1960s, Park won a UNESCO scholarship to go to Paris, where he spent a year. When he came back to Korea, he became associated with Korean Art Informel, an abstraction movement that was in dialogue with similar artistic groups in the West. His Écriture series, inspired by his child learning to write and by Buddhist ideas on self-cultivation through repetition, was begun in 1967 but not displayed until Park’s friend artist Lee Ufan convinced him to present in in an exhibition in 1973. Two years later, he was included in the exhibition Five Korean Artists, Five Kinds of White at Tokyo Gallery, with Kwon Young-woo, Suh Seung-won, Lee Dong-youb, and Hur Hwang. This exhibition is widely recognised to have launched Dansaekhwa, the movement with which Park will be associated for the remainder of his career.
Park was also an art critic, writing for the Dong-A Ilbo, and introducing Korean readers in the 1969s to major avant-garde artists in Europe and America like Jean Dubuffet, Hans Hartung and Jackson Pollock. He taught for many years at his alma mater Hongik University, also becoming its dean between 1986–90. Park’s recent museum exhibitions included Park Seo-Bo: The Untiring Endeavourer at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), Seoul and Park Seo-Bo: Ecriture at Chateau La Coste, Le Puy-Sainte-Réparade in 2021.
