Mark-Making to Mark Time: Park Seo-Bo’s Final Écritures Go On View at White Cube
Throughout his storied career, Korean master Park Seo-Bo persisted in his search for a personal code of mark-making that functioned as both self-affirmation and a form of positive nihilism, stripping away the endless noise of mundane thoughts to embrace the harmonious flow of the universe. His disciplined monochrome abstractions are frequently associated with the Dansaekhwa movement, deeply rooted in Korean traditions and spirituality. Guided by principles of Daoism and Buddhism, Park’s mark-making transcended mere artistic expression, becoming a meditative, almost sacred act—an exercise in surrendering the self to the universal forces that shaped the marks on his canvas.
From his humble beginnings as a young Korean artist of modest means studying in Paris, Park’s journey was one of extraordinary perseverance. Today, his work stands as a testament to his influence, not only as a celebrated figure in Korea but also as an artist of growing international renown, with his pieces commanding six-figure price tags on the global market.
White Cube New York is currently showing “Park Seo-Bo, The Newspaper Ecritures, 2022–23,” the final series the artist completed before his passing in 2023 at the age of 91. These works, delicate as clouds, employ newspapers from around the world as their foundation, merging his iconic Écritures with rhythmic layers of white paint and pencil erasures. While retaining his signature abstract style, this series is deeply personal and profoundly poetic—a culmination of a lifetime’s artistic and existential reflections. Constrained by the physical toll of terminal cancer, which claimed him in his final year, Park approached each piece with unwavering rigor, transforming his daily practice into an act of temporal precision. Each work was governed by a self-imposed principle to complete it within a specific date, making his canvases embodiments of time, both physical and emotional. Reflecting on this poignant series, Park remarked before his death, “I am painting by connecting all the parts of my life with the sum of my life. I think this is the work I can do until my dying day.”
Notably, as the artist recounts in the catalog, Park’s use of vintage newspapers in this series was a deliberate nod to his memories from his early career in Paris. As a young artist with no money, he lived in a hotel and resorted to stealing newspapers from a neighboring shop to clean his brushes or serve as makeshift painting supports. For this series, however, he used primarily vintage newspapers procured by his students. Their fragile nature amplifies the sense of transience they already evoke, caught between their ephemeral function as disposable daily objects and the potential permanence of the historical events and worlds they describe.
By intervening on these pages of life and history, Park Seo-Bo transforms them into a canvas for his signature mark-making. His process of overwriting—with its rhythm of repetitive gestures—intentionally obscures much of the printed content, preserving only select details like dates and places. These preserved fragments often connect to moments from his personal life or significant events in Korean history, subtly weaving his own narrative into the fabric of broader historical contexts.
In this series, Park’s abstraction assumes a deeply introspective quality, resembling annotations rather than purely aesthetic gestures. His marks function like a personal code, an evolving system of symbols developed over a lifetime to chart the passage of time. In this sense, the works align with the practices of Roman Opalka, Irma Blank, and Anna Darboven, artists who used repetitive minimalism to explore time’s fleeting nature. Like Opalka’s methodical recordings of numbers fading in and out of perception, Park’s Écritures trace the imperceptible flow of time, with his marks hovering on the edge of existence—ephemeral yet enduring, like the moments they capture. Each measured inscription over white paint reflects the weight of every day, every breath, and every fleeting act of existence within our finite space and time.
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Similarly, as Blank’s Self-writings and Transcriptions aimed to chart the course of events through a personal lexicon, Park’s work translates the noise of external world news into his language of marks. This process echoes Blank’s examination of the opaque nature of language and the distortions inherent (and misunderstandings possible) in translating the same event across different tongues.
Pauses and breaths alternate with acts of addition and removal in Park Seo-Bo’s Écritures, creating an oscillating rhythm between being and non-being as the artist resists and erases the noise embedded in the newspapers. Each mark and erasure draws forth an eternal past and future, overlapping in a cycle of repetition that transcends linear time.
Although these works originate as intimate, sentimental reflections, they ultimately blend the personal with the collective, embodying both the harmonious fluidity and potential frictions of their interrelation. In particular, Park’s final pieces reveal how his celebrated Écritures series has always functioned as a profound exercise in recording time and space. On a single surface, these “painting diaries” encapsulate both the tangible, physical dimensions of existence and the transcendental, spiritual flow that underpins them.
Driven by a radical pursuit of emptiness, Park reduced painting to an exercise in extreme discipline and rigorous personal methodology, what he called “Myobap,” the law of drawing. This relentless process of self-cultivation aimed to quiet emotional noise and inner dissonance. Through the interplay of fullness and emptiness, his repetitive painted lines distill the essence of universal flow, inviting contemplative surrender to its rhythm. Exemplary of this reductive mastery are the Black and White Écritures, interspersed with the Newspaper Écritures in the show. These monolithic canvases, rendered in essential black and white, are animated only by the continuous, flowing lines that lance the surface, inscribing it like furrows in the earth. Each line marks an existential passage, finding occasional interruption in moments of meditative pause and silence—flat planes that hold space for reflection, stillness and the infinite.
Growing up in a low-income family in the mountains, Park Seo-Bo bore witness to the Korean War, the haunting sight of young soldiers’ deaths, and the silent snow falling over these tragedies as history unraveled around him. These formative experiences, coupled with later struggles of economic hardship after leaving his role at the academy, instilled in him an ascetic acceptance of fate—a surrender to the cyclical, often inscrutable order of events beyond human control. Through the repetition of his daily mark-making ritual, where paint was applied and removed in rhythmic succession, thoughts would dissipate, merging into one another and leaving space for an awareness of the interconnectedness of all things and the delicate balance between presence and void.
Finding solace in the recurring gestures of his practice, Park evoked a sense of eternal recurrence that counterbalanced any sense of fatalism. His work echoes Nietzsche’s notion of impermanence as the “ecstatic affirmation” of life’s creative and destructive forces—a constant cycle of renewal and transformation. This show, in particular, feels like Park’s final ritual of preparation, redemption and surrender to the inevitable. As white paint falls like snow across the surface of the newspapers, covering the records of global and personal events long past, Park patiently retraces these moments for the last time. In the winter of his life, he tenderly revisits and appreciates their meaning, preparing for his departure to another time and place.
In an interview with curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, Park explained, as noted in the catalog, that “art should heal people,” offering solace, comfort, and happiness amidst the tension, turmoil, and stress of contemporary society. With this show, Park offered us, for the last time, a quiet space for contemplation and an invitation to embrace the necessity of fatum—the acceptance of fate that can transcend the pain of life’s conflicts. At the same time, the exhibition is a timeless testament to the universal message and profound spiritual commitment that defined Park Seo-Bo’s extraordinary body of work.
“The Newspaper Ecritures, 2022–23” is on view at White Cube New York through January 11.