Special Exhibition Featuring the Song Su-ryeon Collection: “Contemplation—Abstraction”

In winter, one-year-old branches of paper mulberry are cut and steamed, and the inner bark is stripped off, boiled in lye from plant ash, bleached in the sun, and beaten into fiber; the paper is then lifted from water again and again on a bamboo screen. No chemical bleach is used, and the long fibers interlock, so the paper is soft yet hard to tear, and can take in water, be crumpled, and be layered. From the 1980s Park Seo-bo laid hanji on canvas and, while it was wet, pushed it into ridges with his hands and tools, giving Écriture its look from that decade on. Kim Tschang-yeul also painted water drops on hanji; in damp France, he said, the pulp was slow to dry, so most of this work was made in the studio he built in Pyeongchang-dong, Seoul, in 1988.

Stand to the side of a work on hanji and look at the paper's surface: its fibers and ridges, such as the marks in Écriture where wet hanji was pushed aside and left to dry.

• Dansaekhwa 단색화→From the 1980s, Park Seo-bo's Écriture was made with hanji.

Abstraction is a matter of degree: some works only alter colour or form conspicuously and the subject can still be made out, while total abstraction bears no trace of anything recognisable, as in geometric abstraction. Around 1910 artists such as Wassily Kandinsky, František Kupka and Francis Picabia painted the first abstract pictures. Action painting, widespread from the 1940s to the early 1960s, had paint dribbled, splashed or smeared onto the canvas rather than carefully applied, making the physical act of painting a central part of the work. In Korea, dansaekhwa from the 1970s built its surfaces from a single tone and repeated gestures.

Go close to see how thick the paint is and which way the strokes run, then step back to the masses of colour: which layer went on first, and which last?

• Dansaekhwa 단색화→Dansaekhwa is the abstract painting that emerged in Korea from the 1970s.