NEW YORK, NY.- Christie’s announces Forming Nature: Dansaekhwa Korean Abstract Art, a curated selling exhibition dedicated to Korean modern abstract art and the Dansaekhwa (Korean for ‘monochrome’) movement to be presented this autumn in New York and Hong Kong, featuring an exceptional selection of approximately 60 works created by eight Korean masters. The first comprehensive group exhibition ever to be dedicated to this type of art in New York, Christie’s will showcase 33 paintings at their Rockefeller Center West Galleries from 8 to 23 October. From 6 November to 4 December, 24 different works by the same artists, will be on view at Christie’s Hong Kong headquarters.
The title of the exhibition expresses the essence of Korean abstract art: ‘forming nature.’ To this group of painters, creating art is to form and conceive nature in their own minds, aiming to return to nature and ultimately become one with it. Pursuing abstraction based on content and meaning, these Korean artists differ from Western formalist abstract artists.
Yunah Jung, Associate Vice President, Regional Specialist, Christie’s, declared: “Philosophically profound, visually beautiful, and conceptually unique, the importance of the work of Korean modern abstract artists — and particularly of those belonging to the Dansaekhwa movement — has been acknowledged by museum curators, scholars and collectors alike in recent years. However, despite this growing interest, no comprehensive retrospectives had yet been organized in major cultural hubs such as New York, and we are thrilled to present a major selling exhibition which will provide the opportunity to appreciate the unique aesthetics of Korean abstract art to both the American and the Asian public.”
HIGHLIGHTS
Park Seo-Bo’s con- tributions in liberating artists from institutional conservatism make him a pioneer in establishing the Dansaekhwa movement. Inspired by the instinctive scribbling of his son when he was a boy, Park resumed his noted series of Ecriture, Myobup in Korean during the late 1960s. The series has been continued over more than seven decades of his artistic career, exploring profound depths and maturity in different mediums, colors and styles.
Chung Sang-Hwa (b. 1932) has been developing his own method of repetition of ‘rip’ and ‘fill’ since the early 1970s, after his exploration of Western art in Paris at the end of 1960s. Chung’s monochromatic planes achieve infinite temporality and universality through the meditative repetition. His technique is one of the primary elements that imbues his canvasses with an aspect of infinite space in nature beyond a mere formal geometric picture, encouraging the viewer to sink into deep meditation.
Lee Ufan (b. 1936) is one of the most sought-after Korean artists. In the 1960s Lee established himself as a key theorist and artist of the Mono-ha, materialsbased art movement in Japan. From 1971 he felt an urgency to make a statement challenging Western abstract painting and began his first signature series of paintings: From Point and From Line in 1973-1974, followed by From Wind (1982-86) and With Winds series (1987-91). Later his works became more meditative, as apparent in his Correspondence (19912006) and Dialogue series (2006).
Lee’s entire work is not to be considered abstract painting but a form of meditation.
Yun Hyong-Keun (19282007) is widely known for his simple yet highly meditative paintings. Yun aims to exclude from his art anything artificial or compulsory, which can risk appearing to be apart from nature. After the labor-intensive process of the application of numerous layers of thinned paint, the canvas is placed upright to dry so that the elements of nature and gravity can be involved in the process in the way the paint soaks into the raw canvas.
