Ecriture No. 220614 (2022) belongs to Park Seo-Bo’s hallmark Ecriture series, which he first began developing in 1967 under the socio-political context of Park Chung-hee’s military dictatorship of South Korea. Ecriture is an ongoing series of monochromes in which Park explores how action-oriented abstraction can exist as a study of method rather than subject, through systematic mark-making that creates surfaces simultaneously organized and dynamic. The series first began with script-like drawings on painted canvas, before evolving to primarily feature layered and manipulated Korean Hanji paper.

This piece belongs to Park’s latest body of ceramic work in the series, which is created with special attention to the objects’ material connection to the earth and their variegated surfaces. While the grooves and protrusions on the surface of the work are orderly in arrangement, the lines appear to quiver on the surface, and the rugged edges evoke haptic sensations of organic materials that highlight the liveliness and dimensionality of the surface.