Park Seo-Bo & Huong Dodinh: Emptiness Fullness

In 1967 Park Seo-bo watched his three-year-old son struggling to write within the squares of a practice sheet, and the idea began there. Early Écriture paintings are pencil lines drawn over and over into wet oil paint; from the 1980s he used hanji, laying damp paper on the canvas and pushing it into ridges with his hands and tools; from the 2000s the works turned to vivid color, known as Color Écriture. The materials changed across the three periods, while the repeated gesture stayed at the heart of the work.

First tell which period the work in front of you belongs to: pencil lines, ridges of hanji, or vivid color.

• Dansaekhwa 단색화→Écriture is one of the defining series of Dansaekhwa.
• Hanji 한지→From the 1980s, Écriture was made with hanji.

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.