KOREAN DANSAEKHWA MONOCHROME PAINTING
Park Seo-Bo, Ecriture No.3-78, 1978. Pencil, oil on canvas, 130 x 162 cm. Private Collection.
Lee Ufan, From Line, 1978. Tate, London.
I’ve recently finished a book on the monochrome for Reaktion Books called The Simple Truth. The Monochrome in Modern Art, which will be published next Spring. In this Blog entry I’d like to introduce an intriguing aspect of Korean contemporary art – Dansaekhwa (One-Colour Painting). I discuss it in the book as part of my goal of writing a global history of the monochrome. In later Blogs I’ll come back to the monochrome as an important aspect of modern art, and try to tease out some of its enigmatic but often controversial significance.
Korean monochrome painting of the 1970s and 1980s marks a moment when the society that gave birth to it appeared almost as a cultural tabula rasa. The Republic of Korea was still recovering from a tragic period of civil war, facing continued confrontation with a belligerent communist North and a repressive military government at home. But the period also saw the dawning of a new more prosperous and eventually democratic state directed towards the emulation of Western , and especially American, capitalist models.
Artists associated with Dansaekhwa show a marked preference for earth-toned or white and off-white colours, and they applied paint in emphatically repetitive, process-based ways. Park Seo-bo (b. 1931) scratched rhythmically into a dull off-white paste of oil with a pencil, while Ha Chong-hyun (b. 1935) squeezed earth-toned oil paint from the reverse side of a canvas so it was extruded on the front. Chung Sanghwa (b. 1932) pleated canvases into monochromatic grids and then cut and painted into the cracks he produced. Yun Hyong-keun (b. 1928) treated oil paint as a fluid medium, staining large pieces of unprimed canvas that he worked while they were laid on the floor. Lee Ufan used a brush loaded with a paint composed of stone-based pigment and glue, and progressively depleted the amount of paint deposited by repeating a sequence of horizontal, vertical or random brushmarks according to a predetermined system. Furthermore, several Dansaekhwa artists used hanji, a traditional Korean paper made from the mulberry tree, instead of or in addition to canvas. For example, Chung Chang-Sup (1921–2011) laid hanji in a collage-like fashion onto canvas and then worked it into a rough terrain using oil paint.
The qualities of incompletion and seeming crudeness of execution evident in Korean monochrome paintings are often cited as particularly important attributes of the Korean aesthetic in general, which by comparison to China or Japan is more concerned with conveying an air of nonchalance or an unconcern with technical perfection. Therefore, an ethos of spontaneity, which is seemingly paradoxically fused with an ascetic sense of restraint, is usually associated with traditional Korean art and artefacts, as well as its music and dance. This emphasis on spontaneity can be traced in part to a uniquely Korean cultural heritage: the trance state central to its shamanism, which is fundamentally ecstatic and led to a pervasive admiration among Koreans for the encouragement of a temporary absence of order. Fused with the desire for naturalness, the ethos of spontaneity resonated especially strongly, and rawness, nonchalance and individuality, as well as humour and expressiveness, are usually identified as components of a particularly Korean aesthetic.[i] This foundation fused with the pervasive influence of Confucianism and of Seon (Zen) Buddhism, which fused Chinese Taoism with Indian Buddhism, to create a uniquely syncretic culture.
The emphasis on controlled concrete and repetitive processes is one of the most striking characteristics of the works of Dansaekhwa artists. It is not so much optical properties that are emphasized as the more intimately tactile, haptic, and bodily/somatic. Dansaekhwa artists explored various permutations in the interaction between specific bodily action and specific materials. ‘My kind of minimalism is a method that requires the space around the work to be energized more than the work itself,’ writes Lee Ufan of his practice. ‘The work is not a text made up of signs. I want it to be an energetic living body possessing variability and contradictions.’
The prevalence of white or off-white tones in many Dansaekhwa works can be related not only to the evocation of a Taoist-Buddhist interest in void but also to uniquely Korean responses to Confucian concepts as revealed in the ascetic moral code installed by the Joseon dynasty that ruled Korea between 1392 and 1897. In the official Neo-Confucian ideology, ostentatious display was frowned upon, and the studious life of the scholar highly esteemed. This promotion of an austere and self-abnegating philosophy is clearly evident in the architecture and interior furnishings of the nobility of this period and in the preferred styles of pottery, which are distinguished from Chinese and Japanese examples by their pronounced austerity. Seon, the dominant form of Buddhism in Korea, also advocates physical self-control through strict regimes of contemplation and meditation in order to achieve a level of inner peace. Thus the ability to combine self-discipline and naturalness became especially admired, and the achievement of the latter was understood to come through rigorous training.
The painters associated with Dansaekhwa also reflect this cultural heritage through their embracing of a practice that was concerned with the value of self-negation. ‘As one sheds one’s exterior shell, like the surface of granite exposed to time,’ Chung Chang-sup noted, ‘I will open myself to embrace time, ego, and nature in all traces, stains, and chance happenings.’ Park Seo-bo declared in a similar vein: ‘I want to reduce and reduce – to create pure emptiness. That is an Asian idea, an approach to nature. Nature and humans can connect in this way.’ Park’s works from the 1970s and early 1980s, such as Écriture, No. 14-79 (1979), display a far more controlled, rhythmic relationship to the marks he makes across the surface of his monochromatic oil-painted panels than those of, say, Cy Twombly, appearing overtly to signal a desire to relate to the calligraphic traditions of his culture. At the same time, however, the use of the French term Écriture - ‘writing’ - for the title of the series, indicates that Park was consciously forging a relationship with Western art.
Hyong-keun Yun, Solo Exhibition, David Zwirner, 20th Street, New York (14 January–18 February 2017). Courtesy PKM Gallery, Seoul and David Zwirner, New York/London.
Chung Sang-hwa, "Untitled 83-12-15" (1983)
/ Courtesy of the artist, Dominique Levy Gallery and Greene Naftali Gallery
CHUNG CHANG-SUP at Perrotin Gallery, Paris, 2017.