Born in 1931 in Korea, Park Seo-Bo was a central figure of the Dansaekhwa movement which sparked the diffusion of an original artistic language on the international scene.

Like the Korean scholars and Buddhist monks who saw writing as a purifying process, Park Seo-Bo saw painting and the repetitive gesture from which his monochromes emerged as a catharsis.

Park Seo-Bo first received training in oriental painting at Hongik University. His education was interrupted when he was drafted to fight in the Korean War in 1950. The devastation inflicted by the conflict forced him to abandon this path when he returned to the university, and he shifted to learning Western painting. In a poverty-stricken Korea, he financed his studies by selling portraits to American soldiers in the streets and restaurants. In 1955, he adopted the name Seo-Bo.

At the end of the 1950s, a Korean avant-garde began to emerge, resulting from a desire to integrate the country’s modernization into aesthetic production and in a context still marked by the trauma of war. Park Seo-Bo was a central figure, and presented his work in an exhibition dedicated to contemporary Korean art in New York in 1957 and as part of the “Jeunes Peintres du Monde” residency program in Paris in 1961. That same year, he stayed in Paris on a UNESCO scholarship and became familiar with Art Informel. The artist then immersed himself in traditional Buddhist and Korean philosophy as he questioned the tenets of his own identity in the light of modernity.

Following these reflections, he produced his first Écritures in 1967. These monochromatic canvases have an abstract character linked to calligraphy and became emblematic of the Dansaekhwa movement, of which Park Seo-Bo was a pioneer together with Lee Ufan and Chung Chang-Sup.

Park Seo-Bo's art is the result of a meditative state achieved through the repetition of gesture, texturing the paint on the surface of the canvas; the result of the encounter between mind and materiality. His work, like that of other Dansaekhwa artists, claims a connection with the ontology of traditional Korean thought disowned in the post-war period in favor of Western naturalism: Nature is not conceived in opposition to man and culture, but as an entity intrinsically linked to society.

Perrotin has supported and promoted Park Seo-Bo’s career for nearly a decade, including hosting in Paris his inaugural solo exhibition in Europe, and in March 2023 supporting the groundbreaking ceremony for a museum dedicated to the artist.