Dansaekhwa

also: Tansaekhwa · Korean monochrome painting · 단색화

style c. 1970s-1980s South Korea Japan

Dansaekhwa - Korean for monochrome painting, also romanized Tansaekhwa - is a retroactive name for works first exhibited in South Korea in the mid-1970s by artists who never formed an official movement or signed a manifesto. Rising from the country's postwar Art Informel generation, and shaped by dictatorship, national division, and rapid industrialization, painters such as Park Seo-Bo, Ha Chong Hyun, Chung Chang-sup, Yun Hyong-keun, and Lee Ufan reduced painting to its constituent elements - mark, line, frame, surface, space - working in near-monochrome tones through slow, repetitive, bodily processes. The 1975 Tokyo exhibition Five Korean Artists, Five Kinds of White announced the tendency internationally; promoted in Seoul, Tokyo, and Paris, it became the international face of contemporary Korean art. Its point is not limited color but disciplined material process: paint pushed through coarse cloth, pencil dragged through wet pigment, mulberry-paper pulp soaked into the surface.

Park Seo-Bo is working on a piece of his Ecriture on a huge size of canvas with a pencil in his Hapjeong-dong studio in 1977 in Seoul, South
Park Seo-Bo is working on a piece of his Ecriture on a huge size of canvas with a pencil in his Hapjeong-dong studio in 1977 in Seoul, SouthCC BY-SA 4.0 (credit: 선의의 바람) · source

Defining characteristics

  • Near-monochrome fields of white, beige, grey, umber, or ink-black
  • Slow, repetitive, bodily process recorded in the finished surface
  • Paint pushed through from behind the canvas or dragged across it with tools
  • Materials beyond paint: mulberry-paper pulp, burlap, and unprimed cloth
  • Concentration on mark, line, frame, surface, and the space around them
  • Meditative, anti-spectacular surfaces that reward prolonged looking

Key figures

  • Park Seo-Bo (1931-2023) — Leading figure of the tendency, whose Écriture series dragged pencil lines through wet paint
  • Ha Chong Hyun (b. 1935) — Pushed oil paint through the back of coarse burlap in his Conjunction series
  • Chung Chang-sup (1927-2011) — Worked Korean mulberry-paper pulp and natural materials into meditative wall pieces
  • Yun Hyong-keun (1928-2007) — Soaked umber and ultramarine deep into raw canvas
  • Lee Ufan (b. 1936) — Painter and theorist of the group, also a leading figure of Japan's Mono-ha

Example works

  • Écriture (series) — Park Seo-Bo (from 1967)
  • Conjunction (series) — Ha Chong Hyun (from 1974)

Sources

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