Park Seo-Bo

Drag a pencil through wet paint and it leaves a furrow. Park Seo-Bo's Écriture, begun in 1967, repeated that mark for close to sixty years. From the 1980s he soaked hanji and pushed it by hand into ridges. He described the repetition as a way of emptying himself rather than depicting anything — painting as a discipline of the self. He started in the turbulence of Art Informel and arrived at the silence of Dansaekhwa. He taught for decades at Hongik University, and MMCA, Leeum and the Guggenheim hold his work. He died in 2023.