DANSAEKHWA: MODERNITY, ABSTRACTION AND IDENTITY

The members of the South Korean Dansaekhwa art movement (monochrome painting in Korean) have garnered increasing exposure in New York galleries over the last ten years, reflecting the growing demand for their work on the international art market. Especially memorable in 2014 was “Overcoming the Modern, "Dansaekhwa: The Korean Monochrome Movement", an introductory show of sorts organized by Alexander Gray Associates in New York.

 

Ha Chong-Hyun and Park Seo-Bo, two of its better-known figures, are presently showing in town, giving us a chance to re-evaluate the scope of the movement through the prism of “Lee Ufan-Claude Viallat; Encounter”, a side-by-side presentation of two artists of the same generation, critically important respectively for Asia and Europe, recently curated by Alfred Pacquement in the summer of 2023 at the Pace Gallery in London. 

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Here in Chelsea, the Tina Kim Gallery, following up on its previous exhibitions of Ha Chong-Hyun’s work in 2021, 2018 and 2015, is presenting a selection of his ongoing “Conjunction” series with examples from the 1980s to today. In that particular series the painter typically pushes paint through the coarse weave of raw burlap from the back of the painting towards its front. The paint oozing through the open weave is then spread out over the front surface with different types of marks, leaving exposed intriguing areas of small textured paint bubbles next to brushed areas. Looking at these paintings, one often wishes to be able to see their back as much as their front. In Seoul, around 1974, Ha Chong Hyun started to consider both sides of the surface at the same time, seemingly anticipating Christian Bonnefoi’s own investigations on the reversible nature of the painted surface beginning in Paris in 1978.

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On the Upper East Side, the White Cube Gallery is exhibiting Park Seo-Bo’s (1931-2023) “The Newspaper Ecritures, 2022-23”, his final series of “Ecritures” work, while the Perrotin Gallery in New York showed mostly larger pieces of his “Ecritures”  in 2018 and 2015, and the Tina Kim Gallery also displayed a selection of his work in 2016. 

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In the White Cube show most of the pieces are relatively small, a size dictated by the single newspaper page format on which they are painted. A thick coat of white paint is dripped or brushed on old, yellowed newspaper pages glued on canvas. The wet paint is then scored with a pencil in short repetitive diagonal strokes which indeed bring to mind the act of scribbling.

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Originally called “Myobop” (methods of drawings in Korean), the switch to the French term “Ecritures”, as a generic title for that series of work, came from the discovery by the artist, who studied in Paris in the 70s, of Roland Barthes’ 1953 text on “Writing Degree Zero”. But besides the literary references, the most common association made about that series of work is with the work of Cy Twombly for its calligraphic qualities more than for the introspective references to the Greek and Roman classical periods specific to Western culture. On the other hand, with his paintings mounted on thin threaded rods and “floating” a few inches off the wall, Park Seo-Bo seemed to be as keenly attuned to integrating presentation strategies to the work as Robert Ryman was. 

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Besides an obvious preference for neutral colors, what unites both painters is their use of the materiality of paint, they both work in the wet paint, and appear to decline their signature mark-making in similar ways from painting to painting. Formally, their common style seems to be very much in the vein of the Analytical Abstraction of seventies Europe.

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The Dansaekhwa movement emerged in the early 70s in the context of an isolated and still provincial South Korean culture going through an accelerated period of industrialization. It developed a narrative intently distant from Western Modernism, where notions of national identity played as important a role as those about an Eastern Modernism. The successive calamities of the Japanese colonization (1910-45), of the North/South Cold War conflict (1950-53), and of the military dictatorship that followed (1960-79), all contributed to sap the sense of a collective Korean identity and shared destiny. In the late sixties and early seventies, the need to re-establish a consensual cultural bond in the context of their present-day situation was a priority. 

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The artists’ intent was both to resist association with the Western art narrative, a concern shared with Japanese artists, but also to dissociate themselves from a Japanese discourse which gave them a subsidiary role in the Eastern narrative. In South Korea at that time there was a strong contradictory impulse towards Japan, of economic and intellectual attraction, and simultaneously, of post-colonial repulsion in the face of Japanese ostracism towards Korean culture. 

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In order to avoid anticommunist censorship, abstraction may have been the de facto choice for a generation of artists faced with the only other option of a social realism or rather of a capitalist realism singing the praise of the dictatorship and devoid of any of the critical pop irony that Sigmar Polke or Gerhard Richter could imbue it with in Germany. 

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One can’t really speak about Danseakhwa without mentioning the pivotal role played by Lee Ufan, the theoretician of the movement, but also the main instigator of Mono-Ha (“School of things” in Japanese), the Tokyo based group which preceded the formation of Dansaekhwa in Seoul by a few years.