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By Mark Westall • 8 November 2024
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White Cube is pleased to present ‘Park Seo-Bo: The Newspaper Ecritures, 2022–23’, an exhibition showcasing the final body of work by the late master of Dansaekhwa and Korean contemporary art.
Made shortly before Park’s passing in 2023, aged 91, this is the first time these paintings have been shown publicly. Executed on his personal archive of dated, pre-color newspapers, they are the last iteration of his renowned ‘Ecriture’ series, which he started in the late 1960s.
Park’s best-known series, the ‘Ecritures’ can be understood as a spiritual approach to ‘drawing’ within painting, comprising gestural, repeated pencil lines incised into wet paint. Born in 1931 in Yeocheon, Gyeongbuk, in eastern South Korea, the artist was part of a generation that was deeply affected by the Korean War (1950–53). This new body of work stands as a culmination of Park’s lifelong creative practice, one profoundly influenced by Taoist and Buddhist philosophies and driven by the radical pursuit of emptiness.
Conscious of the limitations imposed by his advanced age and terminal illness, Park opted to work at a smaller scale for ‘The Newspaper Ecritures’. Although recognized as his final series, the artist first experimented with newspapers during his time studying in Paris in the late-1970s, painting on copies of Le Monde which he originally used to clean his paint brushes. Park returned to this concept in the final years of his life, working with his collection of old international newspapers, many of them with significant dates such as family birthdays and anniversaries.
Each made in a single sitting, the works feature strokes, drips, and speckles of paint on newsprint adhered to Korean Hanji paper. Although most of the newsprint body text is obscured, certain elements such as the mastheads remain visible, including the titles The New York Times, The Chosun Ilbo, The Guardian and Le Petit Provençal. On the reverse, Park recorded the time and place of the making of the work. It is through this interplay of symbolic record and inscription that the artist has made what curator Hans Ulrich Obrist referred to as an ‘atlas’ or an ‘encyclopedia’ that blends temporality with creation.
In 2019, Park founded the GIZI Foundation in Seoul, a non-profit organisation dedicated to managing his artworks and archive, as well as supporting young artists. It was renamed the PARKSEOBO FOUNDATION in 2023. In 2025, the Park Seo-Bo Museum Seoul will open next to the foundation, as well as the Park Seo-Bo Museum Jeju, on Jeju Island in South Korea.
‘Park Seo-Bo: The Newspaper Ecritures, 2022–23’ includes more than 30 works, on view for the first time at White Cube New York, from 8 November 2024 until 11 January 2025. A fully-illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition including an interview with Park conducted by Hans Ulrich Obrist during the final months of the artist’s life, an essay by Korean-American academic Mina Kim, along with illustrations of the complete collection of 51 ‘Newspaper Ecriture’ canvases, shown front and back.
Park Seo-Bo, The Newspaper Ecritures, 2022–23, 8th November 2024 – 11th January 2025
White Cube New York
Widely considered one of the leading figures in contemporary Korean art, Park Seo-Bo is credited as being the father of the ‘Dansaekhwa’ movement. Born in 1931 in Yecheon, Gyeongbuk, Park was part of a generation that was deeply affected by the Korean War (1950–53) which divided the country into North and South. After experimenting with Western abstraction, particularly the style of ‘Art Informel’ with which he became familiar during his time in Paris in 1961, Park began to explore a more introspective methodology that had its origins in Taoist and Buddhist philosophy and also in the Korean tradition of calligraphy. MORE
Mark Westall
Mark Westall is the Founder and Editor of FAD magazine –
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