Why South Korea’s monochrome painting movement is the art world’s latest obsession

Think of South Korea today – K-pop, karaoke and plastic surgery will surely come to mind, followed by images of Seoul’s cutting-edge districts, where the latest trends in food, fashion and art are being cooked up and served to a public hungry for the new.

It’s almost hard to imagine that 40 years earlier, the avant-garde was embodied by a loose group of artists, among them Lee Ufan, Park Seo-Bo, Chung Chang-Sup and Kim Whan-ki, whose meditative monochrome paintings were inspired by processes, materials and nature.

And perhaps even harder to understand why they have recently emerged as some of the hottest and most desirable names on the art market. Now referred to as part of the Dansaekhwa movement (literally translated as “monochrome painting”), these painters have created something of a storm in the art world in the space of only two and a half years.

It all started with a book. In 2013, Joan Kee, associate professor of history of art at the University of Michigan, introduced Dansaekhwa to the West with Contemporary Korean Art: Tansaekhwa and the Urgency of Method, the first publication on the topic written in English. Shortly thereafter, in late 2014, three major shows with Dansaekhwa artists opened in Seoul, Paris and Los Angeles, at Kukje Gallery, Galerie Perrotin and Blum & Poe, respectively, the latter curated by Kee. Still going strong and with five shows by Korean artists under its belt since, Galerie Perrotin is currently showcasing works by Chung in its Hong Kong branch.

World-renowned museums like New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Paris’s Centre Pompidou and Hong Kong’s very own M+ soon began to acquire works for their permanent collections, further cementing the group’s already strong global presence.

In response to such institutional success, Kukje Gallery, in collaboration with Tina Kim, New York and Boghossian Foundation, Brussels, mounted the highly-praised group exhibition “Dansaekhwa” as part of the official Collateral Event programme of the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015. Describing this show as “strikingly memorable”, Jonathan Crockett, Phillips Asia’s deputy chairman and head of 20th century and contemporary art, cites it as a personal favourite and one of the strongest presentations that year.

According to Kee, much of Korean art’s commercial and critical popularity is, in fact, the result of a more general “turn to art history,” or in other words “the commitment to think more broadly about histories of modernism and abstraction”. Similar to the Gutai movement in Japan, Dansaekhwa rose to attention due to a desire to explore significant movements, which were previously overlooked in the grand, usually Western, art historical narrative.

Despite their often-mentioned resemblance to American abstraction of the same period, these works are profoundly Korean. “They are original modes of expression discovered autonomously by a post-war generation of artists who grew up experiencing the Japanese occupation and military dictatorship without the privilege of freedom of expression,” explains Kukje Gallery founder and chairwoman Hyun-Sook Lee.