detail
*It has been translated using AI
“I already understood everything.”
In the summer of 2023, Huong Dodinh, an 81-year-old French painter born in Vietnam, visited Yeonhui-dong in Seoul, where master Dansaekhwa artist Park Seo-bo had his studio. The interpretation process, from Korean to English and then into French, was arduous. As Park passionately explained his love of nature and art, Dodinh’s son, who was interpreting, was about to speak. She gently stopped him and said those words. It was a moment when the two artists, whose ways of seeing the world were so similar that no interpretation was needed, connected on a spiritual level.
Park Seo-Bo Museum will open on the site next to where that conversation took place on the 21st. The museum’s inaugural exhibition, marking its opening, is “Park Seo-Bo & Huong Dodinh: Emptiness Fullness,” which traces the bond between the two artists.
The exhibition presents a total of 42 works, including 25 paintings by Park Seo-bo and 17 by Huong Dodinh. Though they came from different backgrounds and cultures, both artists used repetition, accumulation and restraint to strip away unnecessary elements from the canvas and infuse simple forms with depth. Park’s Myobop series captured material action and the traces of time through lines drawn and pushed across wet hanji paper, while Dodinh layered mineral pigments dozens of times onto thin paper and canvas, spreading a subtle radiance through layers of color.
In the basement space where the exhibition begins, works from the 1990s are shown, when the two artists fully developed their distinct visual languages. Although they painted in different ways, their works, which share a similar sensibility, are arranged as if they are looking at one another.
On the second floor, the exhibition features Park’s black Myobop series as well as later works filled with vivid colors. Park mainly used black inspired by the soot of a traditional kitchen hearth. He associated that black with a mother’s love and devotion, and even named it “agungi black.” In the 2000s, he began bringing the colors of nature, such as autumn leaves, jade and the sky, into his work.
The highlight of the exhibition is the third-floor “Cube” space, which receives soft natural light. It is an 8-meter-high square room made of translucent glass. Three late-period white Myobop works, which Park had set aside to hang once the museum was built, are now on display. Measuring 192 centimeters wide and 330 centimeters long, these large-scale works were painted just before his death. For the artist, Korean white was not simply white, but a color drawn from nature, like hemp cloth, ramie or white porcelain. To express it, he laid down a gray base and repeatedly layered white paint on top, gradually finding his own white.
The museum spans 2,000 square meters from the second basement level to the third floor above ground. It includes three exhibition halls, a community space for workshops and other activities, and an outdoor garden. During the exhibition period, singer Yozoh and artist Jin Soo-young will each lead writing and drawing programs linked to the show. Next year, solo exhibitions are planned for media art duo Kimchi and Chips and artist Ryu Noa, who studied Oriental painting. The exhibition runs through Jan. 3 next year.
This article has been translated by GripLabs Mingo AI.
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