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PARK SEO-BO박서보
b.1931, d.2023, Yecheon, Korea. Lived and worked in Seoul, Korea
Park Seo-bo was widely considered as one of the leading figures in contemporary Korean art and credited as the founder of the ‘Dansaekhwa’ movement. Growing up as a young adult during the Korean War (1950-53) and its aftermath, both Western and Korean influences informed his approach to painting. In his early career, Park visited Paris and was exposed to Western abstraction, especially ‘Art Informel,’ the concurrent movement in Europe. Soon after, Park began to incorporate more introspective methodology into his work borrowed from traditional Korean calligraphy as well as Taoist and Buddhist philosophy.
Park was best known for his painting series, Ecriture. Since the late 1960s, the series embraced the spiritual approach to explore the notions of time, space, and material. In earlier works from the series, Park repeatedly scored out the wet monochromatic surface with pencil, foregrounding the materiality of oil paint and graphite. The later works expand upon this heightened sense of materiality as well as Park's subtle, minimal composition by incorporating hanji, a traditional Korean paper hand-made from mulberry bark. This development, along with the introduction of color, enabled an expansive transformation of his practice while continuing the quest for emptiness through reduction.
Park has been highly praised throughout his career for championing Korean art. He received the Art Society Asia Game Changer Awards in 2018 and the Silver Crown Cultural Medal in Korea in 2011. His work has been exhibited internationally, including Langen Foundation, Neuss (2020); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2019); Museum of Fine Art, Boston (2018); the Venice Biennale (1988 and 2015); Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul (2014); Portland Museum of Art, Oregon (2010); Singapore Art Museum (2008); Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2007); Tate Liverpool, UK (1992); Brooklyn Museum, New York (1981), and Expo ‘67, Montreal (1967). His work is included in the collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington; Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York; M+, Hong Kong; Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, UAE; The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul; and the K20, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, amongst others. Park graduated from the painting department of Hong-Ik University in Seoul in 1954. He became Dean of the University in 1973 and received an Honorary Doctorate from there in 2000.
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