“For me, painting has become a mere tool and method to cleanse and purify myself.”
A foundational figure in contemporary Korean art, Park Seo-Bo (b. 1931, Yecheon, Gyeongsang, South Korea; d. 2023, Seoul, South Korea) is widely regarded as the father of Dansaekhwa, the Korean minimalism movement. Born during Japanese occupation, Park’s life and work were shaped by the cultural, spiritual, and political transformations of modern Korea. His artistic career traces a trajectory from early engagement with European abstraction to the development of a uniquely Korean minimalism grounded in repetition, materiality, and meditative process.
In the late 1960s, Seo-Bo’s began his Écriture (or Myobop, "method of drawing") series of rigorously constructed monochromes in which he incised lines into wet pigment, echoing the gestures of writing and embodying the confluence of body and material. These works, first developed in response to watching his young son repetitively write and erase the word “Korea,” became the foundation for his artistic practice, grounded in the act of doing rather than depicting.
Throughout the 1970s and beyond, Park continued to expand this language of mark-making, ultimately introducing traditional hanji paper, handmade from mulberry bark, into the Écriture series in the 1980s. Hanji’s durability helped insure the survival of ancient Buddhist scriptures and is also a part of daily life in Korea, used in wall coverings and door panels. For Park, the medium allows for both experimentation as well as a connection to nature. When soaked and manipulated, hanji offered Park a mutable medium, merging sculptural tactility with the philosophical tenets of Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism that underpinned his thought. The resulting relief surfaces, scraped, pressed, and rhythmically composed, conjure architectural depth.
Although early Écriture works were composed in subdued grays, ochres, and off-whites, Park’s palette broadened dramatically in the early 2000s, evoking nature’s colorful vitality and infusing his work with new sensory immediacy. These shifts reflect Park’s enduring view of art as aligned with the natural world, an extension of his desire to “make something appear as clearly and naturally as water.”
Park’s method, repetitive, meditative, and intensely physical, reflected his conviction that art should emerge from process. He often described his role as that of a facilitator, allowing materials to speak with their own voice. This ethos resonates with the spirit of Dansaekhwa, a postwar movement that fused Korean aesthetic traditions with a distinctly modern sensibility. Park helped to shape a new visual language of restraint and elemental force.
Trained at Hongik University, where he graduated in 1954 and later served as Dean, Park was a critical force in shaping Korea’s artistic landscape. He played a foundational role in establishing the Hyun-Dae Artists Association in 1957 and was instrumental in introducing Western abstraction to a then-conservative Korean art world, notably following a formative period in Paris in the early 1960s, where he encountered Art Informel.
His Écriture series, spanning from 1967 until his passing in 2023, most clearly encapsulates his pursuit of unity between self, material, and the natural world. Executed in single sittings with deep physical and mental concentration, each painting stands as a silent yet dynamic record of lived time, of breath, movement, and presence. Park described the act of mark-making as “forgetting the self,” a gesture toward emptiness that reveals, paradoxically, profound fullness.