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The Rivalry in the Movement of Monochromatic Painting: Park Seo-bo and Lee U-fan

Nan Ji Yun 1

1이화여자대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

Park Seobo and Lee U-fan are the two titans of the movement of Monochromatic Painting, and the artistic rivalry between them is manifested by the sharp contrast between their artistic paths in terms of both theory and career. The different artistic directions pursued by the two artists wrote the history of the Monochromatic Painting movement and formed the framework for the discourse of ‘Korean Modernism’. This article directs its attention not to the personal relationship between Park and Lee but to the art-historical significance of their rivalry. To begin with, the rivalry between the two artists can be explained in terms of their theories of art, namely the meaning they conferred to art. Park shared the premise of ‘modernism’ by attaching emphasis to a certain spiritual world and based the spirituality on traditional views of nature, seeking for contemporary ‘Korean’ art. He inquired into what ‘Korean Modernism’ was and worked within the frame of such a discourse. On the contrary, Lee was concerned with the material world so as to deconstruct ‘modernism’. He cast light on the diasporic identity by positioning himself as an outsider while distancing himself from ‘Korean-ness’. Paradoxically, Lee contributed to the establishment of ‘Korean Modernism’ by presenting what was not ‘Korean Modernism’ outside the boundary of ‘Korean Modernism’. Such a rivalry between them can also be detected in their artistic careers—that is, their activities in the art world. Park pursued his artistic career in the way to establish and solidify his status as an artist in the Korean art scene, and his advance to the international art scene was carried out in the continuum of his activities in the domestic art scene. On the contrary,Lee started his career as an artist overseas. The development of his artistic career took place in the way to secure his status as an artist in the world art scene, and the establishment of Lee’s status in the domestic art scene resulted from his activities in the international art scene. When Park’s artistic career can be characterized by the centripetal movement to identify his own root and to strengthen it, Lee’s, which originated in his being de-rooted, can 284be described as centrifugal movement to deny his root and to explore his relationship to the outside world. The rivalry in terms of identity between ‘Korean-ness’ and ‘diaspora’ was reenacted in the artistic careers of the two artists. It can be said that Park and Lee solidified the movement of Monochromatic Painting by constituting the movement respectively internally and externally. A bigger cultural geopolitical mapping can be done here through an examination of the social and historical conditions of the time when they lived and worked — nationalist ideologies and the relations between Japan and Korea — and the subsequent development of globalization. A rivalry can be characterized by its dichotomous conception and is of goal orientation. The fulfillment of ‘Korean Modernism’ in which the goals of the self-existence and modernization of Korea were artistically embodied, was, therefore, facilitated greatly by the rivalry between Lee and Park. The rivalry against each other critically helped their dominance in the territory of contemporary art, and those that were not conformable to the goals must have been ignored and negated in the process. In this respect, a rivalry can be gendered as masculine. The possibility of yet another history of the Monochromatic Painting movement depends chiefly on one’s realization of the prevalence of male-centrism and, if possible,on the reinstatement of women and the feminine that have been excluded and neglected owing to it. This paper looks into the movement from the perspective of the masculine logic of rivalry, namely the logic of ‘exclusion’, and its ultimate conclusion argues the need to employ this feminine principle of ‘inclusion’ in the reexamination of the movement of Monochromatic Painting.

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