Park Seo-bo (1931-2023), whose real name is Park Jae-hong, graduated from the Department of Painting at Hongik University in 1954. Park issued an “Anti-National Art Exhibition Declaration” at the “Four Artists Exhibition” in 1956, and played the role of pioneering leader of the Art Informel as he joined the Contemporary Artists Association in 1957. Park set up the foundation of Dansaekhwa, Korean monochrome painting after he met Lee Ufan at the end of 1960s. Park led the Dansaekhwa movement while serving as vicechairman and chairperson of the Korea Fine Arts Association from 1970 to 1980. He has served as a professor of the Department of Painting at Hongik University from 1962 to 1997. He was the recipient of the 11th Culture and Art Prize of the Republic of Korea sponsored by the Ministry of Public Information in 1979, the 1st Art & Culture Grand-Prize sponsored by the Federation of Artistic & Cultural Organizations of Korea in 1987, Seoul Art Award in 1995, Silver Crown Order of Cultural Merit in 2011, and the Lee Dong Hoon Art Award in 2014. He founded the Seo-Bo Art and Cultural Foundation, Seoul in 1994. Park Seo-bo led the modernist trend in post-war contemporary Korean art. He made his debut in 1956, criticizing the Academism art centered around the National Art Exhibition of the Republic of Korea. In 1957, he quickly introduced to Korea the Informel abstract art movement from France, which was popular in Japan at that time, and expanded this abstract movement through the Contemporary Artists Association as the movement’s base. The series “Primordialis” was produced during this time. In the mid-1960s, Park was recognized for his solid foothold in Korean art circles as an ambassador of abstract art, and created the “Hereditarius” series while contemplating what the phase after Informel would be. After he met and exchanged ideas with Lee Ufan in the late 1960s, Park discovered the artistic possibilities of ecriture techniques using pencil, and first presented the “Ecriture” series in 1973. Since then, the “Ecriture” series has undergone several changes and has continued to this day. The early phase’s pencil ecriture transformed into Korean traditional paper, Hanji ecriture in the early 1980s, with this technique being called “Mid-and-late phase ecriture.” During the mid-phase of ecriture, from the mid-1980s to the 2000s, he used “zigzag ecriture” and “vertical ecriture,” mainly spread out on a flat plane of black-colored Hanji. Since then, especially in the post-ecriture phase after the late 2000s, he displayed new techniques that actively introduced color as a means of healing. In 2007, he exhibited a large number of post-ecriture phase paintings that emphasized color for his solo exhibition, “Park Seobo Today, Playing with Color,” held at the Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art.
