The painter from South Korea Lee Ufan, who has previously moved to Japan, first presented Korean artists in Tokyo. Going through various stages, Korean abstraction was inspired by expressionism in the 1950s and geometric field abstraction during the 1960s, leading to the 1970s monochrome style painting called Dansaekhwa. Even though discouraged by military repression and imbalance in wealth distribution, the artistic expressions during this era that flourished beyond the conventional meanings and parameters in Korean art, gave birth to abstract art leading to the movements influenced by Art Informel and Abstract Expressionism. Left: Chung Sang-hwa - Untitled 73-A-15, 1973, via / Right: Kwon Young-woo - Untitled, 1982, via .kr The Origins of the Dansaekhwa Korean Art MovementĪfter the Korean War and the separation between the North and South in 1953, strong avant-garde movements started to emerge in South Korea with the younger generation of artists experimenting with new artistic styles as a response to the devastating social situation. Dansaekhwa is often referred as an attempt of assimilation with Western modernism’s styles and a rupture with its cultural past and heritage, but this reading has been marked superficial as it disregards the differentials within the temporality of modernity as it unfolded in East Asia. The movement emerged when the Republic of Korea was still under a military dictatorship and strong social and political control, as a way to challenge the normative aesthetics that prevailed in the country at the time. It wasn't until the year 1980 that the term ‘tansaekhwa’ (or dansaekhwa), that literally means ‘monochrome painting’ in Korean, was first used by a critic Lee Yil to describe a group of abstract paintings distinguished by neutral hues. The artists involved have been loosely affiliated and have worked independently without a group name or identity. Dansaekhwa, the Korean art movement that emerged in the 1970s, became the most crucial artistic movement of the 20th-century South Korea and one of its most famous and successful ones.
Recently, there has been a revival of general interest in art from South Korean, whose work has been underappreciated for a long time.
The history of modern and contemporary art has alway been articulated around the Western-centric position of production, and everything that was different has always been on the margins of the market.
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