White Cube is pleased to present The newspaper ecritures, 2022–23, an exhibition showcasing the final body of work by the late master of Dansaekhwa, Park Seo-Bo. Completed shortly before his passing in 2023 at the age of 91, the works in this exhibition stand as a culmination of the artist’s lifelong creative practice – one profoundly influenced by Daoist and Buddhist philosophies and driven by the radical pursuit of emptiness. Interspersed with Black and white ecriture paintings from the 1990s, the exhibition highlights Park’s formal and ideological concerns across the two bodies of work, as well as his artistic innovations in the medium of paper. Through the harnessing of discipline and methodology, the artist’s work likewise became a personal process of self-cultivation, spiritual enlightenment and a means to nullify an inner dissonance. ‘I want to reduce the idea of emotion in my work to express only that’, he once stated. ‘I want to reduce and reduce – to create pure emptiness’.

Characterized by iterative gestural repetition, and executed on archival, pre-colour newspapers, the Newspaper ecriture series developed through varied applications of white oil paint into which Park inscribed his pencil markings while the paint remained wet. Standing as a profound statement on the act of creation and the temporal fact of their making, they are, above all, diaristic paintings – records of the artist’s gestures, attuned to the immediacy of the drying paint. While Park often adhered to a practice of completing each work within the day initiated, the works are also inherently anachronistic. Bound to their archival substratum, the newspapers – whose yellowed, timeworn pages are imprinted with their original dates of publication – simultaneously situate the artworks within a temporal frame beyond their own.

Recognizing this as his final series and conscious of the limitations imposed by his advanced age and terminal illness, Park opted to work within parameters that allowed him to create unassisted, at a scale corresponding with the reduced span of his reach. Tethered though they are to the circumstances of an artist in his last years, the ‘Newspaper Ecriture’ series traces its origins to Park as a youth in late-1970s Paris, where the premise for these works first took shape. Living at the time in a hotel room in Montparnasse, Park developed the habit of collecting the daily Le monde newspapers left in the hallway by a neighbouring guest, intending to use them merely to clean the residual paint from his brush. In doing so, he observed that certain sections of the day’s news would be obscured, while others remained visible. ‘This is today’s breaking news, the very site of today’, he recollected, ‘and I am almost banishing these!’.

Though the Newspaper ecriture works exhibited were created nearly 50 years after this revelation, Park’s decision to return to the idea imparts intention to the snowy, itinerant strokes and drifting speckles of paint gracing the page. Accruing persistently like static, these painted marks interfere with the noise of the printed bulletins and advertisements beneath. Certain elements remain visible: the mastheads, for example, appear across several of the works, referencing his very first prototypes on Le Monde newsprint. The bold typefaces of the periodicals announce their origins – The chosun ilbo, The New York times, The guardian, Le petit provençal– all of them old pre-colour editions from the 1930s to the 1980s, which the artist sourced specifically for their monochrome ground. The dates on these newspapers no longer register as markers of chronological, daily time but instead convey dates of symbolic significance – such as those of his and his wife’s birthdays – while their versos bear additional inscriptions, recording the time and place of their making. In one of the artist’s final interviews, curator Hans Ulrich Obrist referred to the composite works as ‘an atlas, or an encyclopedia of different moments of mark-making’, to which the artist concluded, ‘I am painting by connecting all the parts of my life with the sum of my life’.

Born in 1931 in Yecheon, Gyeongbuk, Park was in his first year studying Western and Oriental painting at Hongik University when the Korean War broke out in 1950. Drafted into military service – first by the North, and then by the South – he witnessed the devastation of war firsthand, narrowly escaping death while many of his fellow alumni were killed. In the war’s aftermath, Park endured further hardships, living in poverty for several years and, at one point, as a fugitive, during which he adopted the name Park Seo-Bo to evade further conscription. Profoundly affected by the adversities of his youth, he turned to the teachings of Taoism and Buddhism, whose meditative practice of self-emptying through disciplined repetition became a lifelong source of inspiration, offering him a means to assuage his suffering and channel his tempestuous nature. His artistic approach, driven not by a desire to express but rather to negate himself through the act of creation, finds definition in the repetitive, durational process of his Ecriture works – the marks inscribed, as he puts it, ‘merely remnants of pushing the pencil’, secondary to the act itself.

Shown alongside the Newspaper ecriture series, the Black and white ecriture paintings from the 1990s embody the confluence of two of Park’s notable innovations. Firstly, his incorporation of hanji, a traditional Korean paper handcrafted from mulberry bark, and secondly, the method by which he manipulated and sculpted the material into ridges and furrows, one that may be understood as an extension of the act of ‘pushing the pencil’. As with the Newspaper ecriture, the Black and white ecriture employ a strategy of repetition and a monochromatic palette, speaking to Park’s evolution as an artist through subtle alterations in medium and technique. Though resolutely abstract, extemporary traces of personal evocation manifest in the dark, matte surfaces of the ‘Black’ paintings, recalling the artist’s vivid childhood memory of charcoal and soot accumulating in his mother’s kitchen, while smooth, rectangular ‘windows’ offer moments of visual respite, echoing the swathed white regions of the Newspaper ecriture works.

Produced in the winter of his life, as his health waned, the Newspaper ecriture works give complete form to the virtues of mental stamina, strength and fortitude that Park sought to cultivate. Exhibited for the first time in New York against a backdrop of social, political and environmental unrest, Park’s ‘Newspaper Ecriture’ series brings a renewed poignancy to the enduring idea of his life’s practice: emptiness. Here, as in the ‘Black and White Ecriture’ paintings, repetition becomes a meditative ceremony, a curative ritual that acts to mute the noise of the world, redressing the self-serving impulses that appear to both characterise and trouble contemporary, everyday life.

Park Seo-Bo (1931–2023) is widely credited as being the father of the ‘Dansaekhwa’ movement. Throughout his career, he was lauded for championing Korean art. Among his accolades, he received South Korea’s Geumgwan Order of Cultural Merit in 2021, the Asia Society Asia Arts Game Changer Award in 2018 and the Silver Crown Cultural Medal in Korea in 2011. His work has been exhibited internationally, including Château La Coste, Aix-en-Provence, France (2021); Langen Foundation, Neuss, Germany (2020); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2019); National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul (2019); Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts (2018); 56th and 43rd Venice Biennale, Italy (2015 and 1988); Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul (2014); Portland Museum of Art, Oregon (2010); Singapore Art Museum (2008); Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2007); Tate Liverpool, UK (1992); Brooklyn Museum, New York (1981); and Expo 67, Montréal, Canada (1967). His work is included in the collections of the Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Centre Pompidou, Paris; K20, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Germany; M+, Hong Kong; The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul; and Tate, London, amongst others.