Background
Park Seo-Bo was born in 1931, in Yecheon, Gyeongbuk, South Korea. While he spent his childhood in Yecheon, he soon moved out to Seoul.
Park Seo-Bo was born in 1931, in Yecheon, Gyeongbuk, South Korea. While he spent his childhood in Yecheon, he soon moved out to Seoul.
Park Seo-Bo graduated from the painting department of Hong-Ik University in Seoul in 1954.
Park Seo-Bo started his artistic career as a founding figure of the art movement Dansaekhwa. Dansaekhwa, also known as baeksaekpa (the School of White), refers to a group of paintings in Korean art that began to appear in the late 1950s and fully emerged in the art world by the mid-1970s. Park and his contemporaries such as Lee Ufan, Chung Chang-Sup, and Kwon Young-Woo began incorporating abstract motifs and unconventional techniques in their works as a reaction against the prevailing academicism. Dansaekhwa was also a response to the unstable conditions in the country at the time; 35 years of Japanese Occupation and the Korean War had been replaced by a conspicuous American presence.
Although abstraction in Korean art was influenced by North American Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism, Park's paintings are not an uncritical absorption of outside influences but rather a negotiation between the traditional and the new. "Ecriture" — his most famous and ongoing series conceived in the 1960s — uses Western Modernist techniques of painting on traditional Korean hanji paper. In early works, Park used a pencil or a stylus to make repetitive marks on the canvas, but since the 1980s he has been manipulating the pulp of hanji paper while its surface is wet. "Myobop" — as "Ecriture" paintings are known in the Korean language — means 'law of drawing', a phrase that reveals the artist's interest in Taoist and Buddhist philosophies. Further nicknamed 'the journey of the hand', the process of repetition eliminates individual gestures and becomes one of meditation.
Paintings in the "Ecriture" series have experienced stylistic changes over the years. Park's work from the 1990s and early 2000s were black and white, two of the most important colors in East Asian philosophy — black represents time and pure emptiness, while white alludes to death spirituality and the void. Since 2002, Park has incorporated other colors as well, using acrylic paint to mold linear patterns on the wet pulp of hanji paper. From a distance, these monochrome paintings appear to be one color or empty. Borrowing the language of abstraction, rejecting painterly codes from Western Modernism and combining these methodologies with Eastern philosophies, Park attempts to capture and convey the ideal of emptiness or "no mind", according to a press release from Tina Kim Gallery's 2016 solo exhibition of Park's work.
Park has also led an impressive career as an educator of art in South Korea. Between 1962 and 1994, he taught as a professor at Hongik University, Seoul — one of the most prestigious institutions of art in the country and his alma mater. In 1986 he became the Dean of the College of Fine Arts, a position he would hold until 1990. Park continues to participate in the contemporary Korean art scene through his Seo-Bo Art and Cultural Foundation, Seoul-based and founded in 1994.
Park's work has been recognized both nationally and internationally. He has exhibited in many institutions across Asia, the USA, and Europe, and has exhibited twice at the Venice Biennale in 1988 and 2015. Referred to as the father of Dansaekhwa, Park's paintings have been included in several group exhibitions, including When process becomes form: Dansaekhwa and Korean abstraction, the Boghossian Foundation, Brussels in 2016; Dansaekhwa and Minimalism, Blum & Poe, Los Angeles in 2016; and Dansaekhwa, a Collateral Event of the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015.
ECRITURE No.960201
ECRITURE No.060805
Ecriture
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Ecriture No. 070201
ECRITURE No.22-79-81
Hereditarius No.1-68-A
Ecriture No. 070405
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Ecriture No. 050319
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Ecriture No. 050520
Ecriture No. 070325
Ecriture No.40~84
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For Park, merging Eastern philosophical ideas with formal painting techniques is of the utmost importance. Inspired by Taoism and Buddhist practices of meditation, the artist’s practice fuses a highly refined material vocabulary and classical idioms rooted in calligraphy with the rigor of western Modernism in an attempt to capture and convey the ideal of emptiness or “no mind.” This concept of emptying the mind of preconceived ideas in order to channel a purer embodiment of creative energy is grounded in Park’s unique studio process in which he uses repetitive mark making to eliminate individual gestures.
Quotations:
"Art is no longer an act of fulfillment, but an act of emptying."
"Our minds need constantly to evolve and, if your mind changes, so does your work. If you do not change as an artist, you falter: you become an imitation of yourself. That said, the evolution should be gradual. This conundrum can be hard to understand, but change usually begins with a very small idea. I realized a long time ago that you don’t fail if you make continual, long-term efforts to change – this way, eventually, your practice synthesizes with the artwork."
Park Seo-Bo is the member of ‘Dansaekhwa’ movement.
Park Seo-Bo has two children, Park Seung-ho and Park Seung-jo.
