“Our generation seems fated for tragedy, but there is something to be said about living through history,” the artist Park Seo-Bo wrote to his friend, the painter Kim Tschang-Yeul, in late 1973. “We work ourselves to death for over 10 hours daily, all while trying to get the so-called real world to accept us.”
Park was 42, living in Seoul, and running a pencil through white paint to make a meditative series he called “Écriture” (“writing” in French). Kim, 43, was settled in Paris, and had not been home to South Korea in eight years. He was painting ethereal water drops. A few weeks later, another vanguard Korean artist, Lee Ufan, who was making spare, striking paintings with repetitive brushstrokes, wrote to Park from Tokyo. “I believe you may become even lonelier as time passes,” he told his friend, “because there is no one showing you the way or following in your footsteps. You must carry on and persevere.”
Today, the three men are recognized as cornerstones of both Dansaekhwa (Korean “monochrome painting”) and Modern art in Korea. Kim, who died in 2021 at 91, will have a retrospective at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul in August. Park, who died at 91 in 2023, got his retrospective there in 2019. Lee, 88, has museums dedicated to his work in three countries and will show at Dia Beacon in New York next spring.
A treasure-filled new book from the Tina Kim Gallery in New York charts their early years and their remarkable rise, collecting letters they sent each other in the 1960s and ’70s, before their art entered important collections around the world. Through June 21, an accompanying exhibition at Kim’s Chelsea space presents their trailblazing art, and that of Kim Whanki (1913–74), a key influence on the trio whose correspondence with them from New York is also in the volume. (Kim, for my money, is one of the 20th century’s greatest painters, and the gallery has on loan one of his rare and resplendent “Universe” paintings, a blazing red piece from 1971 composed of countless individual dots.)
Many people are now aware of “Korean corporations, K-pop, K-beauty—all these successes—and how that has contributed to the Korean art market,” Tina Kim said in a phone interview. “But I wanted to really show, and share, the story of how these artists really struggled, from the ‘50s. There is so much work that they did to arrive today.”
The book, The Making of Modern Korean Art: The Letters of Kim Tschang-Yeul, Kim Whanki, Lee Ufan, and Park Seo-Bo, 1961–1982(which is also the title of the show), offers an intimate look at artists who were facing long odds—and hellbent on overcoming them. It should inspire any artist struggling today, and it illuminates South Korea’s remarkable growth in the decades following the Korean War.
The country, “in a way, was like an island” in the 1960s, Yeon Shim Chung, an art historian at Hongik University in Seoul, said in a video interview. She edited the meticulously researched volume with Doryun Chong, the chief curator of the M+ museum in Hong Kong. North Korea and China were closed off, and South Korea did not establish diplomatic relations with Japan, its former colonizer, until 1965. Its economy was small, and “there was no very good commercial gallery,” Chung said. ”So the artists are really active, they’re doing business because there’s no one representing their work.” President Park Chung Hee was ruling as a dictator. “These artists are looking for freedom,” she said. Many decided to try their luck abroad.
The letters—many on thin sheets of paper that could be folded into an envelope, to minimize the cost of postage—reveal them strategizing, gossiping, honing their art, and kvetching. Writing in 1966 from New York, while on a Rockefeller Foundation grant, Kim Tschang-Yeul told Park that it is “a brutal city” and that “food comes mostly from cans.” In 1969, he decamped for the French capital, where he lived the rest of his life. Tina Kim said that the artist once joked to her, “I used to have a naengmyeon store in Paris, a cold-noodle store.” She explained, “So many Korean artists used to stay with him, and they were so poor, and he would serve them cold noodles.”
The disparities between the far-flung artists are, at times, distressing to read. In 1975, Lee reported to Park that some of Kim Tschang-Yeul’s works were going for 10,000 francs, and that they were “selling so fast that he can hardly keep up with demand.” Just a year earlier, Park had written to Lee to say that he had been unable to make art the previous winter in Seoul, amid a recession, inflation, and frigid temperatures. “Oil prices were so high,” he said, “that I couldn’t even afford heating; on freezing days I just holed up in a corner reading books.”
There are moments of remarkable, and amusing, candor. At various points, Park counsels Kim Tschang-Yeul against showing at one Seoul gallery because “they do not have that many rich clients,” tells him to make marks on fabric that he is bringing from France because it is illegal to import it raw into South Korea, grumbles that a leading art critic is nearly a year late in contributing to a catalogue, and describes various health issues. His colleagues frequently implore him to cut back on his drinking.
While Kim Tschang-Yeul’s art has a refined and fragile beauty, he comes across as a mischievous figure. “This year I am having exhibitions nonstop like diarrhea,” he told Park in 1974, and said in another letter to him, “I wish that you may not get any fatter and be healthy.” Guiding Park on how to deal with officials at the Ministry of Culture in Seoul, he wrote: “I advise you to be careful but daring.” (Words to live by.)
There are also deeply touching passages, as when Kim Tschang-Yeul thanks Park in a 1975 letter for sending him sautéed gochujang. “Every time we have it, I can’t help but think of your wife, who is like the full moon,” he said. After a visit to Korea from Japan with his wife and children, who had never been before, Lee informed Park that he was essential to helping them “truly learn about our native culture.”
The quality of the artists’ penmanship varied. Park was tidy when writing in Hangul (the Korean alphabet) and Chinese ideograms, Kim Tschang-Yeul less so. It was not always easy for the editors to understand the intricacies of their discussions, half a century removed from the action. Thankfully, Park was still living when the project began, and he sat with Chung for extensive interviews. His memory was sharp, and his archives were vast. “I think he really had archive fever, keeping everything, not only his own materials,” she said. “Maybe he did not trust the government at the time in Korean to protect artists.”
Through it all, it is clear, they believed. “Our country is on its way to becoming a wealthy nation,” Lee wrote to Park in 1975, with shocking prescience, “and with it we will see contemporary Korean art have a more prominent presence internationally.”
My only complaint is that the show is not two or three times bigger. It is a museum survey waiting to happen, and the sumptuous book is all ready to support it. (Along with the editors, Kyung An, the Guggenheim Museum curator, contributes a sharp essay.) But given the cultural cachet that Korea now has, there will no doubt be more exhibitions, with even more art by these four—and by other power players. “There are many more artists who contributed,” as Tina Kim said. “I’m sure they all exchanged letters. So this, I think, is only the beginning.”
—Andrew Russeth
