‘Old Newness’

A few days ago I gave a talk at an International Conference on World Heritage held in Korea. The title of the conference was ‘World Heritage. Old Newness.’ The two-day conference included a video address from Stephan Doempke, the Chair of World Heritage Watch in which, amongst other things, he discussed the damage to cultural sites in Ukraine: since the war began on 24 February, UNESCO has verified damage to 168 sites.

My talk was in the section of the conference dedicated to ‘Artistic Interpretation of World Heritage and Creation of Future Heritage’, and was entitled ‘Cultural Heritage as ‘Memory Event’. The Case of Dansaekhwa’. I am posting the first part of the talk today in a slightly different version. I discuss the Korean art tendency known as ‘Dansaekhwa’ (One-colour-painting), which emerged in the Republic of Korea in the 1970s - I have written about  Dansaekhwa on more than one occasion in this blog and also published several essays on various aspects of the tendency, and there’s a chapter on it in my book ‘The Simple Truth. The Monochrome in Modern Art’ (2020). In this talk I discuss how these Korean artists’ works can be seen to transform the rigid experience of Past and Present into a more personal and inward experience of Then and Now.

First if all, here are examples of works by some Dansaekhwa artists:

Park Seo-Bo, Ecriture No, 28-73, 1873, Pencil and Oil on Canvas, 194.0 x 130.0 cm. Courtesy Kukje Gallery, Seoul.

Yun Hyong-keun. Umber, 1988-1989. Oil on linen, 205 x 333.5 cm. Courtesy of Yun Seong-ryeol and PKM Gallery, Seoul

Chung Sang-Hwa (1932-), Untitled 75-10, 1975, acrylic on canvas, 161x130cm. Courtesy Hyundai Gallery, Seoul.

Installation shot of works by Lee Ufan from the 1970s at Kukje Gallery, Seoul.

 ‘Cultural Heritage as ‘Memory Event. The Case of Dansaekhwa.’

By ‘memory event’ I mean a recollection of a specific occurrence which includes vivid details for the one doing the recollecting. It implies a ‘momentary’ sense of time, a temporal experience in which the linear chain between before and after is broken, and a moment drops out of its historical connection with other moments and gets a significance of its own. A ‘memory event’ overcomes the sterile binary of ‘past’ and ‘present’, substituting instead the potential for synthesis.  One re-imagines the experience of history as something partially freed from linear order and objective causal succession.  The Past and Present become the ‘Then’ and ‘Now’, a more personal and less rigid relationship to time.

The term ‘memory event’ fits very well the relationship to history evident in  Dansaekhwa artists’ works. They blended an interest in Western modern art with what they consider important aspects of their own indigenous culture that are conducive to expression through monochromatic painting. In particular, they emphasize the tangible -  the physical and sometimes laboriously repetitious working of a painting’s surface - and they engage more than the sense of sight by including touch and movement as part of the encounter.  Dansaekhwa artists were motivated by the desire to unite or bring into alignment their bodies and their work in order to bridge the gap between the mental and the physical, the inside and outside. For them, a painting becomes as a living intermediary between the self and the world.   

The cultural background to their intention  is the artists’ attachment to pre-modern, pre-Western cultural ideals, which they sought ways to re-imagine  for modern day Korea.  This was possible because of the awareness of history as the perpetual coming into existence, developing, decaying and going out of existence of all things. Rather than the Western idea of progress, their relationship to time was more characteristic of  what has been called the East Asian “‘Tao’ of history “, a relationship with which Dansaekhwa artists were intuitively associated. This meant attuning to   alternation:  to repeated occurrences in   space and time and involved bringing together ideas and things across time and place. It characterized relationships to the past in terms of what is meaningful from the perspective of the individual constructing the connection in the present. In this temporal model, time is experienced as non-linear, dissolving, diaphanous, and ephemeral.  It is something that can only be perceived, measured and remembered through an individual’s actions. As a result, history is conceptualized as a situation with potential in the present, something to be used to advantage in the now.

It seems evident that the artists associated with Dansaekhwa possessed a still graspable connection to the forms of social life in which the traditional, pre-industrial, experience of time  was grounded. They were immersed in a deep and pervasive background culture that permitted them to envisage a different relationship to history from Western artists, who were trapped within linear time. They lived within the “Tao’ of History’, and  hoped to give material expression to a vision of the future of modern Korea that conjoined Western influences with the appreciation of the continued validity of their inherited traditions, which were understood not as tokens buried within immobile tradition but as renewable resources.  However, the moment in the development of Korea in which Dansasekhwa  existed, one when it was possible to articulate an ‘unofficial’, personal, but socially liberating relationship to the past -  to see  the Then of pre-modern Korea  in the Now of modern Korea  -  has probably passed. The ‘memory events’ of young Koreans are no longer fed by these pre-modern, pre-westernization springs. They are much more deeply buried.