Though active as an artist from the mid-to-late 1950s, it was not until the following decade that Park would conceive of his ‘Ecritures’. For much of the late 1950s and early 1960s, and informed by his training in Western painting at Hongik University in Seoul, his work centred on the question of what to paint. This initial enquiry emerged following an extended stay in Paris in 1961, when Park travelled there to participate in the UNESCO exhibition ‘Jeunes Peintres du Monde à Paris’, remaining in the city for a year after learning the exhibition had been postponed by ten months. During this period, his encounters with European modernism – particularly the gestural and anti-compositional tenets of Art Informel – gave rise to visceral, abstract works that registered the traumatic aftermath of the Korean War. By the late 1960s, however, as Park’s engagement with Taoist and Buddhist philosophy deepened, this line of enquiry underwent a decisive shift: the question of what to paint yielded to one of how.

Borrowed from the French word for ‘writing’, ‘Ecriture’ afforded Park a language with which he could reconsider the act of painting and de-emphasise artistic intent in favour of process. From the outset, he approached the canvas as a surface upon which gestures could be inscribed and accumulated over time, often through the repeated application of pencil markings into still-wet monochromatic grounds, as seen in early works such as Ecriture No. 5–71 and Ecriture No. 8–71 (both 1971). Redirecting his earlier concerns, which sought to lend visual expression to an existential unease, the ‘Ecritures’ offered a curative ritual through which such interior states could be channelled and reflected.

The artist only returned to Paris in the late 1970s, during a winter break from teaching at Hongik University. Conceived during this period and revisited in his final years, the ‘Newspaper Ecritures’ represent a pivotal moment in the formation of his art as practice. Living in a modest hotel room in Montparnasse, he began experimenting with the newspapers he had been using to clean his brushes. In a letter to his wife dated 1977, he writes of his frustration with the damp winter air: ‘These days the paintings simply refuse to dry, so while waiting for them to do so, I’ve been picking up copies of Le Monde […] and experimenting with them’. Turning to the materials at hand, he began to inscribe iterative pencil markings onto their surface, the fragility of the newspaper necessitating a more immediate, single-breath gesture that countered the slower, more methodical incisions of his earlier works. Strokes, drips and marks unfold across the printed page, leaving in places the newspapers’ mastheads and fragments of text visible beneath the paint, binding the act of painting to the passing of time and to the material residues of the everyday.

In 1972, upon a sudden realisation that memory would eventually fail him, Park developed a rigorous system of documentation: recording daily events in personal diaries and assembling extensive archives of newspaper and magazine articles, which he printed, organised and bound into multiple volumes. Within this framework, the ‘Ecriture’ paintings can be understood as an extension of this impulse to record: a form of diaristic inscription that operated in parallel with his pursuit of self-cultivation. While aesthetic beauty was not what the artist sought to realise in his practice, his later ‘Pencil Ecriture (colour)’ paintings, produced as his health began to decline, nonetheless disclose a formal elegance as a corollary of the act itself. No longer able to complete a work within the span of a single day, these works took shape over extended durations, at times taking years to reach completion. In Ecriture No. 190411 and Ecriture No. 190403 (both 2019), horizontal passages of pencil lines accumulate in a slow, rhythmic back-and-forth across delicate fields of yellow and blue. Regarded by the artist as a ‘reinterpretation’ of his earlier ‘Ecriture’ works, the series signalled an opening from this strictly self-cultivatory programme towards an expanded concern with art’s potential for collective healing.

In the final years of his life, Park extended the principles of ‘Ecriture’ into the medium of ceramics. From the late 1980s onwards, his work came to assume an insistent three-dimensionality through his innovations with hanji, a traditional Korean paper whose soaked pulp he worked on the canvas surface, using his fingers or carving tools to produce ridges and furrows. Long drawn to clay, he translated that same tactility to his luminous acrylic on ceramic works, shaping and accreting the wet material in a similar manner though realised here through sculptural relief.

Conceived between 1971 and 2023, the works exhibited in Paris see Park’s posthumous return to the city, and bear witness to the artist’s single-minded effort to record both his emotional life and the circumstances of his time. Granting Park endless opportunities for experimentation, the ‘Ecriture’ works realise, through acts of restraint and repeated gesture, the artist’s profound capacity for introspection and endeavour to attain inner peace through self-effacement. This radical, lifelong pursuit would come to play a formative role in the development of Korean minimalism and establish Park as a leading figure of Dansaekhwa.

Park Seo-Bo (1931–2023) is widely credited as being the father of the ‘Dansaekhwa’ movement. Throughout his career, he was lauded for championing Korean art. Among his accolades, he received South Korea’s Geumgwan Order of Cultural Merit in 2021, the Asia Society Asia Arts Game Changer Award in 2018 and the Silver Crown Cultural Medal in Korea in 2011. His work has been exhibited internationally, including Château La Coste, Aix-en-Provence, France (2021); Langen Foundation, Neuss, Germany (2020); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2019); National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul (2019); Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts (2018); 56th and 43rd Venice Biennale, Italy (2015 and 1988); Leeum, 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, Montréal, Canada (1967). His work is included in the collections of the Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Centre Pompidou, Paris; K20, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Germany; M+, Hong Kong; The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul; and Tate, London, amongst others.