Imagine spending whole decades perfecting one type of painting. In one medium. In one colour. If you can’t, you’re just not Zen enough – and you’ve spent far too little time around South Korean art of the past 50 years.
Park Seo-Bo is regarded as the founder of dansaekhwa, or tansaekhwa, a hugely influential school of post-war Korean minimalism that looks like abstract expressionism. Complex? Nah, pal, it shirks extraneous ‘meaning’: creating these canvases is supposed to require the artist to enter a state of blankness, and repeat the same technique over and over.
You know the feeling straight away. Entering White Cube, you are confronted with literal blank canvases (dansaekhwa translates as monochrome). But each work from Park’s Ecriture paintings of 1983-93 is full of detail. Some are huge, murky and precise – sort of OCD Rothkos. Some are encrusted with a paper called hanji that is soaked with paint then scraped and pulled around the surface. The effect can be like marks on drying concrete. Dark patches of once-wet white hanji paper have a water-damage feel, echoing time passing. Just think: half a century has gone into perfecting this work.
Luckily for us busy, modern, metropolitan types with our steam-room yoga sessions, we’re already accidentally acquainted with dansaekhwa principles. They’re basically the same as mindfulness: concentrating on being in the moment, letting the things that make us stressed as owt fall away. I bet you’ve sat through that talk in your creative office space. This is just like that, except it works.