The Korean Monochrome Movement

Overcoming the Modern Dansaekhwa: The Korean Monochrome Movement Overcoming the Modern Dansaekhwa: The Korean Monochrome Movement Chung Sang-hwa Ha Chong-hyun Hur Hwang Lee Dong-Youb Lee Ufan Park Seo-bo Yun Hyong-keun February 19 – March 29, 2014 Alexander Gray Associates Overcoming the Modern1 Dansaekhwa: The Korean Monochrome Movement In the 1967 March issue of Sato Garo Geppo, the newsletter of the Sato Gallery in Tokyo, Lee Ufan published the article The Aesthetics of Self Contradiction, in which he criticized the conflation of national identity and cultural production.2 The article portrayed a candid image of a young Lee grappling with his national background and his profession, “A Korean versus an artist.”3 Approximately ten years earlier, after only a few months spent as an art student at Seoul National University, Lee abruptly left his native Korea for Tokyo, where he studied philosophy at Nihon University. By the time he published the aforementioned article, he had already received acclaim as an artist and critic among Japanese and Korean intellectuals. Lee Ufan’s struggle with notions of belonging, national identity, and artistic innovation is emblematic of the concerns shared by many of his contemporaries at this time. It is this very attempt to generate new paths of artistic expression resulting from a negotiation with local cultural specificity, and a Western notion of modernity that defined what came to be known as Dansaekhwa, or Korean Monochrome Painting. The Republic of Korea (est. 1948), only eight years old when Lee left for Japan, was a result of escalating Cold War antagonism between the Soviet Union and the United States in the aftermath of the Second World War. Since its inception, the country had gone through a major war with its northern half and had suffered through immense economic difficulty. Most of the 1960s and 1970s saw Korea under the authoritarian rule of military strongman Park Chung-hee who, while advancing capitalism and investing in a wealthier but politically suppressed middle class, stifled the voice of the opposition that was discontent with the cost paid by the impoverished classes due to unbridled economic growth. These pressing social and political issues were to underline the conceptual framework of several artistic movements within the young republic such as the Korean Monochrome Painting and would eventually dictate the formal and stylistic characteristics that artists would adopt. Korea was equally impacted by Japanese Colonial Rule from 1910 until 1945. In the course of nearly four decades, and in an attempt to justify imperial rule, the Japanese authorities tried to destroy all evidence of a distinctly Korean culture. The Japanese sought to eradicate any notion of “Koreanness” by censoring publications, suspending Korean language newspapers, forcing the adoption of Japanese family names, annexing land, 3 drafting Koreans into the Japanese military and labor camps, collecting Poignant as it is, the discussion surrounding the Korean Monochrome and destroying historical materials and archives, and tampering with and Movement is not limited to its political alignment and intent. There has inventing archeological evidence. This episode would re-emerge decades been also an ongoing debate about its artistic ascription and authorship. later and remain profoundly attached to the discussion around Korean Lee Ufan, Park Seo-bo, Kim Whan-ki, Kwon Young-woo, Lee Dong-Youb, modernism, in particular the school of Dansaekhwa. Yun Hyong-keun and many of their peers were operating in a fast-changing world; one that was breaking free from the fetters of the past while trying to Such were the times in which Lee Ufan and many of his contemporaries appropriate the constraints of a bygone era into materials that could inspire were raised. While only some of them experienced first-hand the harsher a new art. This back and forth between past and future paralleled a constant years of the last episode of colonial rule, they had all lived through the oscillation between geographies. Most of these artists spent time in Paris, Korean War and the severe poverty that ensued. In any event, they most New York, and Tokyo, and some emigrated permanently, such as Lee Ufan. certainly felt the grip of Park Chung-hee’s totalitarian rule throughout the Whether in their travels or in their homeland, they were fully immersed in 1960s and 1970s. Some art historians have ascribed the Dansaekhwa a dialogue that began in the mid-1950s and continued onwards, which artists’ adoption of abstraction to a conscious rejection of the figurative focused on the convergence between Western abstraction and local artistic styles that were often simplistically coerced by the State into becoming a tendencies of a similar aesthetic. mouthpiece for political propaganda. Ironically, in the mid-1970s and well into the 1980s, it was exactly the monochrome painters’ use of abstraction, The artists mentioned earlier, along with other Korean Monochrome seen by many critics and curators as an expression of a contemporary art painters—such as Chung Chang-sup, Chung Sang-hwa, Ha Chong-hyun, form that was uniquely Korean, that positioned the group as the State’s Park Seo-bo, Choi Byung-so and Hur Hwang—were fully aware of the choice du jour when using the art exhibition as a tool for cultural diplomacy. latest artistic trends of the time, including the 1950s American Abstract Such exhibitions were almost always primarily constructed around a “tacit Expressionism, the International Art Informel in Paris, the 1960s Color will to redefine the idea of a contemporary Korean art, to play author so to Field Painting or what Clement Greenberg called Post-Painterly Abstraction, speak. The exhibition offers a tempting chance of testing one’s powers and the Minimalism of Agnes Martin, Piero Manzoni and Yves Klein, and even asserting one’s cultural authority.”4 That was the case, for instance, with Arte Povera in Italy. However, while the image of the artist as espoused the Secondes Rencontres Internationales d’Art Contemporain held in Paris by Western modernist thought was primarily based on the notion of self- in 1978 where the participating Korean artists, most of whom belonged sacrifice through withdrawal from the social domain in pursuit of an elusive to the Korean Monochrome Painting Movement, were fully sponsored by transcendental reality best expressed through free art, Korean modernism the Ministry of Culture and Information. Such favoritism implied a flagrant of the 1960s and 1970s was significantly burdened by questions of preference on behalf of the authorities and was heavily criticized by those nationalism, continuity and rupture, tradition and innovation. One attempt at who were excluded and therefore lacked access to the same opportunities resolving such dichotomies was through the inclusion of native materials — of international exposure. However, not all discontent was driven by a desire such as Korean hanji paper, traditional rice paper, and ink—and utilizing for inclusiveness. Some, such as the critic Won Dong-suk, considered them in the traditional, yet non-Korean, two-dimensional canvas. Through Dansaekhwa to be completely disconnected from “the realities and the such formal choices, the Korean Monochrome artists’ intent was to sensibilities of the people.”5 Other critiques echoed the frustration felt by complicate the interface between what was perceived as “western” Lee Ufan in his 1968 article over the framing of cultural and artistic philosophical thought and practice, and “the local pursuit of aesthetic merit within national representation. For instance, when reflecting on the perfection as the embodiment of an ideal, capable of restoring links to Secondes Rencontres Internationales d’Art Contemporain, Paris-based society and to the natural world.”7 sculptor Chung Bo-won wrote, “Why frame the show, basically a gathering Most integral to the conceptual paradigm underpinning the practice of the of individual outlooks and tastes, in terms of grand tropes of race or Dansaekhwa members was the championing of the physical nature of the tradition?”6 artwork. For his series entitled Ecriture, Park Seo-bo layered white pigments on the canvas upon which he repeatedly drew pencil lines flowing in one 4 5 direction. Sitting on the floor with the canvas laid out in front of him, he Informel painting happily admits its Far Eastern ancestry, what with repeated the same movement over and over until he and the materials he its emphasis on Character, Gesture, Sign, Dream Stone, Cloud, employed became one unit. Other artists conceived a variety of methods to the Thrown Sponge, as an instrument for painting with and, of intensify the encounter with the artwork’s materiality. Youn Myeong-ro applied course, more or less imperfectly understood Zen. And what about thick pigments of color which he subsequently cracked, Ha Chong-hyun the Informel of the Far East itself? We have considered it might pressed dyes to the back of his canvases until the color soaked through be interesting to pose this question, by presenting a group of the hemp, and Kwon Young-woo poked holes through traditional Korean pictures by young Korean painters. They belong to the generation paper.8 Despite their differences, these artists have a commonality with the that was marked by the War and received their training in Seoul. artwork’s three-dimensionality and a relentless insistence on highlighting Now it up to us to try to detect what part of their work is due to the and engaging with the physical qualities of the materials used. globalization of an artistic movement and what retains an element of ancestral “Character.”12 The Korean Monochrome painters’ emphasis on materiality was intended to intensify the viewer’s encounter with the artwork, and consequently, to In 1968, upon the opening of Contemporary Korean Painting at the National destroy the traditional hierarchy of power between the artist and the viewer.

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