About this place
A museum dedicated to Park Seo-bo (1931–2023), the founding figure of Korean Dansaekhwa (monochrome painting), housing his hanji and graphite works and tracing the movement's development from the 1960s onward.
Park Seo-bo (1931–2023) was the central figure of Dansaekhwa — the Korean monochrome painting movement that emerged in the early 1970s as Korean artists sought a visual language independent of both Western abstraction and officially sanctioned realism. Dansaekhwa (단색화, literally 'single colour painting') is characterised by a meditative process of mark-making and erasure using hanji (Korean mulberry paper), graphite, and pencil on canvas — works built up through hundreds of hours of repetitive gesture rather than through compositional decision-making in the conventional sense.
Park's Écriture (기법) series, begun in 1967 and continued for decades, uses the wet hanji paper as both support and agent: he would press pencil marks into the wet paper and then partially erase them, leaving a surface of extraordinary tactile subtlety. The series undergoes several transformations — from the dense, grid-like early works to the looser, more atmospheric late works in pale colour — but maintains a consistent conceptual core about process, time, and the mark as both act and trace.
The museum dedicated to his work provides an opportunity to understand Dansaekhwa not as a peripheral version of Western minimalism but as a movement with its own historical and philosophical roots — in Taoism, in Zen, in the specific material traditions of Korean art-making, and in the political conditions of post-war Korea. The collection spans the full arc of his career and is the most comprehensive resource on his work.
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