PUBLIC ART SPACE: Guiline Kim

These paintings depict no particular subject; what matters is how they are made. One action is repeated, and the traces it leaves become the work. Park Seo-bo's Écriture began with pencil lines drawn again and again into wet paint, and from the 1980s pushed ridges into damp hanji; Yun Hyong-keun let thinned paint seep slowly into linen and called it “Heaven and Earth.” The name Dansaekhwa was only proposed in 2000, as a way to group these works together.

Look closely at the surface first, then step back and take in the whole field of color.

Public art is usually, though not always, commissioned for the site where it stands. Monuments, memorials, civic statues and sculptures are its most established forms, but it can also be temporary: performances, graffiti, posters and installations. A work designed for one particular location and bound up with it is called site-specific; moved elsewhere, it loses all or much of its meaning. The term "public art" is generally said to have been first used by John Willett, in Britain, in Art in a City (1967). Unlike traditional public art centred on objects, later works treat a place as a space of social, cultural and political exchange, inviting local communities and viewers to take part, or lasting only for a time before being taken down. In Seoul, more than 200 sculptures from around the world were permanently installed in Olympic Park for the 1988 Olympics; the introduction to SOMA Museum of Art's exhibition From Monument to Landscape calls this an important turning point in the development of contemporary public art in Korea. The city has also placed public art in Seonyudo Park, a former water purification plant turned into an ecological park.

Step back and see how the work sits with the buildings, paths and trees around it; then watch the people passing: does anyone stop, or do they walk by as if it were part of the scenery?

• Modern Sculpture 현대 조각→Statues and sculptures in parks and streets are among the most established forms of public art.
• Mural 벽화→Murals are one of the genres public art takes in.