Umberto Eco alerted me early on to the importance of handwriting. In 2009, he told The Guardian: ‘The art of handwriting teaches us to control our hands and encourages hand-eye coordination. It obliges us to compose the phrase mentally before writing it down. Thanks to the resistance of pen and paper, it makes one slow down and think.’
Today, with the hypervelocity of images and text circulating in our world, handwriting has become endangered. But, as Etel Adnan said, ‘if we lose handwriting, we lose an enormous amount of meaning, because writing and drawing are an art. Something written by hand says more than just words – it reflects a psychological state.’
The notion of slowing down and thinking deeply connects to the practices of Park Seo-Bo and Irma Blank. When I visited them, it was towards the end of their lives. I wanted to know about their beginnings, how they had come to the form of writing and mark making they brought into painting.
Park told me that, in the beginning, he was ‘a man of many desires.’ His early work was highly expressive, almost aggressive. The idea of the wall was very important, as was the idea of intense pain that he channeled through the work, almost using art as healing. The wall, the repetition, the pain – it all became part of a process.
I was fascinated by how his ‘Écriture’ series began. It came out of a crisis, a deep creative and personal crisis. He told me that one day, he saw his second son – who was very small at the time, maybe 3 years old – climb onto his older brother’s desk. The boy started writing words in a gridded notebook. One character per box, one after another. But then he erased what he had written. And because he was not holding the paper tightly, it crumpled. He tried again. It crumpled again. Frustrated, he scribbled all over the page. And then he gave up. In that moment, Park had a revelation. This was what he had been looking for: the act of resignation. The experience of erasure, of failure, of letting go. So he began to emulate that. This became ‘Écriture’ – a process of writing, erasing, repeating. He described it as a way of emptying the self. A kind of self-cultivation, like Buddhist chanting.
In 1955, Park met a female monk, Kim Il-Job, who told him to take a Buddhist sculpture home and repeat the chants. But he said, ‘This is an idol.’ So she told him, ‘Then replace it with a rock, smoothed by infinite waves. Repeat the chants to the rock, or, simply repeat your own name.’ Before leaving, he asked her, ‘Have you met Buddha?’ And she said: ‘When I met Buddha, I realized that Buddha was myself.’ Park told me, ‘I erase my thoughts one by one, to empty my mind.’ This is the essence of ‘Écriture’.
Even in his final years, after being diagnosed with lung cancer, he continued working. He no longer made large paintings – he was not sure he could finish them. Instead, he began making smaller works, on vintage newspapers from his and his wife’s birth years. His assistants found these old newspapers, and he created new ‘Écriture’ works on them. They became his final works, his last gesture before passing. In the end, Park believed the world was turning into a ‘hospital full of stressed people.’ So he made art to bring comfort, to slow things down.
—Hans Ulrich Obrist
