Dansaekhwa

About

Dansaekhwa, roughly 'monochrome painting', names a loose group of Korean abstract painters who came to prominence in the 1970s, years of rapid industrialisation under authoritarian rule. They issued no manifesto but shared a method: repeating a simple action until process and material became the subject. A 1975 exhibition in Tokyo of five Korean painters working in shades of white helped define the group.

Each artist found a distinct gesture. Park Seo-Bo scored pencil lines into wet paint again and again in his Écriture series. Ha Chong-hyun pushed oil paint from the back of coarse hemp cloth through its weave. Yun Hyong-keun let umber and blue thinned with turpentine bleed into raw canvas as dark columns. Kwon Young-woo tore and punctured layers of Korean paper, and Chung Sang-hwa built grids by folding canvas and prising away paint. Lee Ufan's fading rows of brushstrokes link the tendency with Japanese Mono-ha.