PARKSEOBO FOUNDATION

Text by Valentina Buzzi (Curatorial Researcher, PARKSEOBO FOUNDATION)

There is a simple yet profound question that Korean master Park Seo-BO asked himself at the threshold of the new millenium, while witnessing a world rapidly changing due to the advent of technology: what role could painting assume in the 21st century?

The early 2000s were marked by the advent of globalization, and by a newfound fast-paced environment that appeared very different from the one the artist grew up in. As someone that would infuse his artistic practice with both observant and meditative attitude, for Park Seo-Bo this question became poignant. From this point onwards, his work shifted from black and white to a new era of color, reflecting the thoughts, questions, and challenges of this new stage of the artist’s inquiry and interpretation of the world surrounding him.

Almost two decades later, LG OLED and the PARKSEOBO FOUNDATION collaborate on an exhibition that begins with the same question. For in this age increasingly defined by speed, stimulation, and saturation—where images arrive in endless succession and are forgotten just as quickly— there is a need for a proposed counter-rhythm: a return to slowness, to presence, to the resonant stillness that color can carry. In the midst of this ongoing up-tempo, we invite the audience to step away from the noise and into a space shaped by light, silence, and the body’s quiet attentiveness, facilitated by an harmonic encounter between painting and technology.

Park Seo-Bo, a foundational figure in postwar Korean abstraction and the father of Dansaekhwa, lived through a century of turbulence and transformation. His life bore witness to war and occupation, authoritarian rule, and the rapid acceleration of modernity. And yet, amid this complex history, he came to believe that art could offer a different kind of presence—neither reactive nor escapist. He arrived at the conviction that art could offer more than reflection or resistance; it could offer repair. He envisioned painting not as spectacle, but as a space of healing. Repetition, labor, rhythm: these became the gestures through which emotion was processed and transmuted. As he once wrote, “The ‘stress’ of the viewer, their instability, anticipation, and inner struggle—I believe these need to be absorbed. That is perhaps the role of painting now: an act of healing.”

Rethinking such statements for the present time, this exhibition brings together both original Ecriturepaintings and high-definition LG OLED digital interpretations, offering a space for a deep encounter between analog and digital, tradition and innovation, body and screen. Rather than oppose these formats, the layout invites them into dialogue. The booth’s organic, womb-like structure gently curves to guide visitors inward. Paintings and digital screens are carefully positioned, allowing light, material, and silence to shape the viewer’s experience. At its center, a resting zone offers pause: a moment to sit, breathe, and simply look.

The artist started to look into the essence of colors that were close to him, bringing a new reading into what they can mean, and how their symbols and depth can be translated into the canvas. Black and white represented the first steps into this new chapter of his Ecriture series. Black, the soot of an old kitchen hearth, recalled his mother and the love embedded in labor and sacrifice; and white—humble, unbleached, and textured—held the quiet spirit of Korean literati scholars, echoing the stillness of baekja porcelain and the spiritual emptiness of hanji. That moment marked a turning point. From that day forward, Park began to “borrow” color from nature—not to depict it, but to internalize and translate it through the movement of his hand.

Park’s color Ecriture series emerged in the early 2000s, when he found himself at a creative precipice. Standing, in his words, on a “cliff edge,” he faced the question of how painting could evolve in a time when the boundaries between different worlds were beginning to blur.

Red became the beginning of Park’s intention to work with brighter colors—his entry into a new mode of thinking and feeling. It was during an autumn walk in the mountains that he was struck by the overwhelming red of the foliage, a natural spectacle so intense it felt almost violent. It embodied the raw force of nature, and with it, a confrontation with time, impermanence, and mortality. Park described it as a color that brought him to his knees: a reminder of his smallness, and of the regenerative power held in the natural world.

Yellow followed, inspired by the fields of canola flowers blooming across Jeju Island in spring. But for Park, this yellow was not only bright; it carried the emotional energy of renewal. It spoke of beginnings, of courage, of the optimism tucked inside even the most fragile things.

Green—his most constant companion—was drawn from the grasses, leaves, and quiet breathing of the everyday. He called it the rhythm of being. Green was not just a color—it was a frequency, a pulse, a sign that life endures.

Other tones soon entered the palette, each with its emotional weight:
Orange, the color of ripe persimmons, spoke to maturity and the slow unfolding of time.
Pink, borrowed from the bloom of azaleas, evoked longing and emotional memory.

These were not conceptual colors—they were lived ones. Each hue held memory, each layer of pigment an echo of breath, emotion, or loss. The paintings do not shout; they hum. They invite the viewer not to interpret, but to feel.

Through LG’s OLED technology, these lived colors are rendered with a depth and precision that extends Park’s vision rather than replacing it. The digital works do not try to mimic the textures of canvas or hanji—they illuminate the qualities of light, rhythm, and emotional temperature that might otherwise remain invisible. The works expanding from the OLED screens, with their perfect blacks and self-emissive pixels, become a medium for transmission: a continuation of Park’s meditative inquiry, made legible to a contemporary audience fluent in digital perception.

Visitors are invited to engage with both physical and digital works, not in contrast, but as different forms of encounter. One is tactile, marked by time and material; the other is luminous, ephemeral, and atmospheric. Each invites a different kind of meditation. In this duality, Park’s central question resounds more clearly: What can painting be today? The exhibition does not speak on his behalf; it offers the conditions to feel through the question ourselves.

In today’s noisy and fragmented world, we need spaces where we can reconnect with ourselves, with beauty, and with one another. That, Park believed, is the role art could serve in the 21st century. Presented at Frieze Seoul—and precisely because of the accelerated pace of an art fair—this exhibition becomes not just a presentation, but a necessary pause. A moment of care.

By understanding noise, Park Seo-Bo gave us the gift of silence. Through this exhibition, his vision lives on—not only preserved, but extended. Not only remembered, but felt.