Park Seo-Bo

Private Collection, Seoul
Sotheby's S2, Hong Kong
Acquired from the above by the present owner in March 2015

Hong Kong, Sotheby's S2, Avant Garde Asia - Lines of Korean Masters, March 2015, illustrated in color

This work is in very good condition overall. There is very light evidence of handling along the edges. There are several small spots of accretion visible, one near the upper left edge and the other in the center of the work. Areas of translucent spot accretions are scattered throughout the work, possibly due to the artist’s working method. Under extreme raking light, a rectangular area of flaking paint is visible 10-inches from the left edge and 27-inches from the bottom edge, with a small area of corresponding loss. Additionally, there is an incidence of paint loss near the center of the canvas 23-inches from the bottom edge and a small area of flaking paint 31-inches from the left edge and 44-inches from the bottom edge. Under Ultraviolet light inspection, there is no evidence of restoration. Unframed.
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In Écriture No. 51-79, formal restraint gives way to rhythmic scrawls of graphite that swell, peak and resolve in waves of expressionistic splendor. Executed in 1979, the present work emerges as a paradigmatic example of Park Seo-Bo’s iconic Écriture paintings, a body of work that propelled the minimalist abstraction of the Dansaekhwa or “monochrome painting,” movement to the forefront of the Korean avant-garde and secured its place within the global narrative of Contemporary art. Across the vast monochromatic vista of the canvas, Park Seo-Bo articulates reconciliation in painting, simultaneously evoking the ruminative practice of Korean calligraphic tradition and the radical purity of contemporary minimalism, ultimately creating a tantalizing visual dialogue that engages geographic, visual and communicative boundaries. Conceived in the late 1960s, Park Seo-Bo’s series of Écriture are characterized by their lyrical scribbles. French for ‘writing,’ Écriture is an apt title for this seminal body of work; the gestural brushstrokes suggest both urgent note taking and meditative drawing. Spanning nearly five decades, Park Seo-Bo’s highly influential corpus emerged from Korea’s post-war and post-colonial firmament. The artist, along with his peers in the Dansaekhwa movement sought to redefine the country’s cultural identity by developing a painterly language that departed from the gestural abstraction of the Abstract Expressionists in North America and their European counterparts, by emphasizing the physical nature of material and artwork and referencing classical Korean tradition. Each Écriture painting is comprised of a series of line drawings in which pencils or wooden sticks are dragged through wet oil paint, creating a multidimensional rhythmic cadence of textural vigor. This process “creates a factor between the tracks where the lines are drawn and the paint that touches those lines creating an inner design echoed throughout the painting" (Oh Kwang-Su, "The Methods and Times of Park Seo-Bo," in Exh. Cat., Beijing, Arario Gallery, Park Seo-Bo, 2007, p. 124). Each work, although appearing iterative, is completely unique.

Despite the tempestuous process in which it was executed, Écriture No. 51-79 radiates with a sense of grace, distilling the history and practice of Korean calligraphy into a novel form using the gesture and minimalism of Western Contemporary art. Park Seo-Bo approaches calligraphy’s lexical boundaries, overcoming them to create something illegible and exceedingly simple. Neither poetry nor drawing nor musical score, Seo-Bo embraces an abstract-visual language all his own, incorporating a dialogue with the classical past into a field of pure visual sensation.