Park Seo-Bo
Drew pencil lines through wet paint for sixty years, at the head of Korean Dansaekhwa.
Park Seo-Bo was born at Yecheon in Korea in 1931, lived through the Korean War as a student, and became the central organising figure of Dansaekhwa, the monochrome painting movement that is Korea's principal contribution to post-war abstraction. The Ecriture series, begun in the late 1960s, is the whole of the later practice: white or coloured oil is laid on canvas and, while still wet, is drawn through repeatedly with a pencil, so the line displaces ridges of paint that dry as raised furrows. From the 1980s he soaked hanji, Korean mulberry paper, onto the canvas and worked it while wet. He died in 2023.
The surfaces are ridged, matte and physically raised, which makes them fragile in a specific way: the furrows crush under contact and under bad packing, and the damage cannot be reversed. Works are unique. Date and series are the identifying facts, since Ecriture spans more than fifty years and the early pencil works and the later hanji and colour works are separate in the market. Signature, title, date and dimensions are typically inscribed on the reverse in both Korean and Latin script, and the studio archive is the reference.
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