1 The Asian Modern, Volume II © John Clark, 2013 Park Seo-Bo, (1931 - ) Korean Notes: Teachers Lee Ung-no/Eungro 1904-1989 Eastern art is much more spiritual than Western art, and as such, it has been unable to reach true popularity. As we revive past traditions and push for creative Eastern painting through hard work, our art should surpass the art of the world. (cited by Kim Youngna, 2005, 30). Lee Ung-no’s technique: He selected sheets of traditional, handmade Korean paper, with which he was so familiar, tore and ripped them by hand, and attached them to his canvas. His collage work, irregular and texture –focussed, was his own reaction to the Art Informel movement sweeping Paris at the time. His work differed from Western artists in that they cut out the desired forms and placed them on the canvas, but Lee used a variety of novel methods like affixing pieces to his canvas and then tearing them again, scraping the pieces he had placed one over the other to reveal paper underneath, and coloring the paper with India ink or other pigments. (Kim Youngna, 2005, 31) Korean Informel or Abstraction? Manifesto of 1957 Modern Art Association Our Association shall deliberate as to how the art of the past ad present must change, and all the antitheses of feudalistic elements that stand in the way of cultural progress shall be our model. We shall start from an individual understanding of these two tasks. Whether our works will realize this ambition and whether we will have fruitfully communicated with the high-brow Formalists will be determined only by time, toil, and a sense of reality. (cited in Lee Yongwoo, Information and Reality: Korean Contemporary Art, Edinburgh: Fruitmarket Gallery, 1995, 17) Park Seo-bo wrote in 1979: One day [around 1957] I destroyed all the forms on the canvas. I poured water on the canvas and rubbed it with a piece of laundry soap; as I scratched the surface with a pommel, the underlying colours floated up like gemstones. I felt an instinctive pleasure from unexpected effect. Sine I wasn’t comp0letely satisfied, however, I continued with meaningless actions, splattering, dripping, scraping and staining, in an intuitive way. I couldn’t tell what was what. Regretting what I had done, and feeling discontent and unresolved, I went to a drinking hole and downed quite a bit of rice wine. I walked back to the studio, quite inebriated, turned on the light and at that moment I thought, yes, this is it. Perhaps one might say I felt liberation in a world with no narratives, just pure actions. This was the beginning of my work that would later be called informel. (cited by Kim Youngna, 20th century Korean Art, 2005, 206) Park Seo-bo in an interview with the critic Lee Kyung-sung, speaking of lack of international influence in 1957, said in 1979: I would like to claim that Korean society in the 1950s was so closed that there was practically no access to international information. It was even impossible to buy a book. As I have said earlier, my new work started with the act of destroying a pre-existing value system which had grown impotent. One cannot claim, therefore that the Korean informel was directly related to internationalism. I supposed it could be argued, however, that 2 The Asian Modern, Volume II © John Clark, 2013 internationalism came in on the boots of United Nations troops and indirectly infected our consciousness. (cited by Kim Youngna, 20th century Korean Art, 2005, 207) Bang Geun-taek wrote in November 1959: We are grappling with a vocabulary of certitudes for a new future that will shine, in the midst of the present confusion, directly on the desire for life. Breaking away from all rationalist things of the precise intellectual systems until yesterday, we endorse the beginning of a new world where the desire for life comes from the self. We acknowledge that there is not only the discovered but also an enormous remainder in the world that has not yet been treaded upon. (cited in Kim Young-na, 20th century Korean art, 2005, 211). We must demand originality and one’s own subjectivity from artists…The issue is what kind of statement we will provide for art within international trends. (Kim Byoung-ki, ‘Demanding one’s own Subjectivity’, Sasanggye (Thought World) May 1961 cited by Kim Young-na, 2005, 38). Manifesto for October 1961 exhibition: Thus all things are in a state of dissolution. ‘Yesterday’ and ‘Now’, ‘You’ and ‘I’ and ‘Things’, have all melted, flowed together, and gathered in one place. All the fragments of ‘I’ that have dissolved are bumping and floating with other particles here and thee. Those fragments that have not yet completely melted away are struggling to stay afloat. And this is the meaning of creative acts. It thus cannot be fixed. It is nothing but a movement in transit. It is but heat and light that is being emitted. This is all the freedom permitted to ‘I’. The absolutes of today may someday crystallize into a core. Now ‘I’ am but hot. We are all sizzling and burning. (cited in Kim Young-na, 20th century Korean art, 2005, 214). These abstract artists are attached simply to the influence or imitation of Expressionist form. It is absurd that, as they engage in unoriginal imitation, they wield power as the avant-garde, spearheading a new movement. (Yi Yeol-mo, ‘Abstraction is not art’, in Sedae (Generation) November 1963, cited by Kim Young-na, 2005, 38) Many informel works no longer survive especially due to the economic constraints of 1957- 60 when informel was being formed. At the time, a camera cost almost as much as an apartment does now. It was so consuming just to paint, overcoming all kinds of obstacles; when paintings were done, we were exhausted. As soon as the paintings were hung, we would dart to drinking holes. It seems that there was a widespread tendency to deride the idea of preserving the shit we made through photographs, seeing it a reflection of institutional thinking. Since most of us were living in tiny rooms, moving from place to place, and there was no space to put the paintings, you put them outside and neighbourhood kids would play with them and tear them up. You considered yourself lucky if you managed to save the frames. Sometimes we didn’t even return to claim dozens of works submitted to exhibitions, and they got lost. (Kim Tschang-yeul in a 1987 letter to Kim Young-na and cited in her 20th century Korean Art, London: Laurence King, 2005, 200) Miyakawa Atsushi, ‘Anfuorumeru igo’, [After Informel], Bijutsu Techô, May 1963 [winner 4th Art Criticism Contest] In the moment of simply reacting against academicism in abstract art, however, informel may be defined as nothing but ‘art terrorism’ that denies all the languages of modern art and seeks a pure, complete expression, but such a conception would be a miscarriage of 3 The Asian Modern, Volume II © John Clark, 2013 the true possibilities of contemporary life contained in it. Contemporaneity is thought of only in terms of style, but the contradiction between the contemporary as a concept of style and modernity as a concept of value inevitably makes itself manifest sooner or later. This is probably the true reason for the early disenfranchisement of informel. The fact that the act of expression had become an end in itself became clear to everyone, but in the modern context, this act becomes empty when it is seen as a ‘vehement confrontation’ and can only become a gratuitously eloquent expression. All that was left after the bankruptcy was anti-art. (translated by Stanley Anderson in Shimbata Yasuhide et al, 20 seiki Furanzu kaiga no chôsen: Inforumeru to ha nanika? / Postwar Abstract Painting in France and Art Informel, Tokyo: Bridgestone Museum of Art, 2011, 170) Tansaekhwa or Monochrome School The essential issue concerns what new possibilities the flat canvas work as a work of art can present. Painting, which reduces itself to a flat canvas, must assume a painted texture on that flat surface. Texturing of the plane, whether or not you fill the canvas with colour or form, means that the color, form, and canvas exist on the same level so they enjoy a unified reality (Lee Il in 1975 cited by Kim Young-na, 2005, 48) Monochrome artists also surpassed the material, tactile world of the canvas in order to locate themselves within a space spreading to infinity. This space, they claimed, was a mental space as well as an origin, or a return to nature and a world born of nature’s creation and assimilation. (Kim Young-na, 2005. 50) …In sum, to us white is not accepted as a physical form…our white suggests all possible existences of light. Our ancestors who pained landscapes in ink did it not, of course, because they could only see nature in black and white because they could draw it that way. Rather, they did it because they believed the essence of nature could be better expressed that way .. We become one with nature in a spiritual space. In a word, white on its own embodies all possible creation. (Lee Il in foreword to 1975 exhibition at Tokyo Gallery Five Korean Artists, Five Kinds of White. Cited by Kim Young-na, 2005, 50). Kim Young-na (2005, 51) associates rise of monochrome school in the 1970s which an interest in cultural identity once the difficulties of the war’s aftermath had in some degree been overcome.