As this year marks the first anniversary of the death of Korean dansaekhwa master Park Seo-bo, galleries in Korea and abroad are commemorating his legacy by unveiling his last body of paintings and works that capture the artist created by Korean sculptor Gwon Osang.
White Cube in New York will show Park’s “Newspaper Ecriture” for the first time, the final body of work created by the artist before his passing in 2023. The exhibition offers an opportunity to learn how the artist developed his signature "Ecriture" series until his final days.
“It took a year and a half to prepare the exhibition that was planned while Park was alive,” Park Seung-ho, chairperson of the Park Seo-bo Foundation, told The Korea Herald on Monday. The White Cube exhibition will open Nov. 8 and run through Jan. 11 in New York.
Executed on archival newspaper pages, these works are marked by both the date of the publication's release and the artist’s dynamic application of oil paint, and make a profound statement on the intertwined nature of temporality and creation, according to the gallery.
Park, known as an “untiring endeavorer” for his over 70 years of work in painting, began his "Ecriture" series in the 1960s. His early “Ecriture” series were pencil works that involved repeatedly drawing lines with a pencil on a canvas covered with white oil paint. The series later evolved to employ colors, "hanji" -- traditional Korean paper -- ceramics and newspapers.
The Busan-based Johyun Gallery is presenting a special exhibition in collaboration with sculptor Gwon Osang, whose eight sculptures depict Park at different stages in his life. The works were previously shown at the Park Seo-bo Foundation’s exhibition in 2022 titled “Park Seo-bo as Object.”
Integrating photography and sculpture, Gwon has pushed the boundaries of sculpture. Photographing a subject from many angles, he prints the photos and pastes them onto a sculpture, creating what he calls "photo-sculpture." The exhibition runs through Oct. 27 at the gallery.
Park pioneered dansaekhwa, a genre of monochrome paintings and a modern art movement led by a loose group of Korean artists in the late 1960s and 1970s. Dansaekhwa would later become the first contemporary Korean art movement to break through internationally.
Although dansaekhwa -- literally meaning "monochrome paintings" in Korean -- became an established term in the art scene, Park himself did not like the term, as it could be taken simply to mean monochrome paintings. If he could name the art genre again, it would be something like “working with nature,” the artist told The Korea Herald in an interview in 2020.
Park admired nature and pursued natural quality, which was reflected in his art.
Park was awarded the country’s highest cultural honor, the Geumgwan Order of Cultural Merit, in 2021 for his contributions to Korean art. He died Oct. 14, 2023, at the age of 92.
A five-story museum commemorating the artist, measuring 1,983 square meters in floor area, will open to the public in early 2026, situated next to the Park Seo-bo Foundation in Seodaemun-gu, Seoul, according to the foundation.
