Colors drawn from lived memory find new life across a canvas of light
Courtesy of LG OLED and the Park Seo-Bo Foundation
At Frieze Seoul, the Park Seo-Bo Foundation and LG OLED present Colors Drawn from Nature, the first exhibition of the artist’s work since his passing three years ago. In Korean tradition, such a mourning period marks a respectful pause, a time in which the legacy of the deceased is held in silence before being reintroduced to the public. This exhibition, therefore, arrives with particular weight: not only as a return, but as a reawakening of Park’s vision in a moment where questions of tradition, technology, and continuity are especially urgent.
Courtesy of LG OLED and the Park Seo-Bo Foundation
Park Seo-Bo, often described as the father of Dansaekhwa (monochrome painting), spent his life asking what painting could mean in times of turbulence, speed and distraction. His Écriture series, developed across decades, was not only a formal exercise in repetition but an act of repair. Through the disciplined rhythm of the hand, he sought to absorb instability—his own and that of the viewer—transforming it into a quiet, meditative stillness.
Courtesy of LG OLED and the Park Seo-Bo Foundation
The Color Écriture works, which emerged in the early 2000s, bear particular significance. Each hue is not chosen for aesthetic effect but drawn from the lived textures of memory and landscape. Red, inspired by the violent blaze of autumn leaves, represented for Park the confrontation with mortality and the overwhelming force of time. Yellow, luminous with the renewal of Jeju’s spring canola blossoms, spoke of fragile beginnings and the courage to start again. Green—the most constant—was the pulse of grasses and leaves, the rhythm of everyday life, endurance itself. Orange, from ripening persimmons, evoked maturity and time’s slow unfolding. Pink, from the fleeting bloom of azaleas, carried longing and remembrance. Black, drawn from soot at his mother’s kitchen hearth, recalled labor, sacrifice, and love. White, unbleached and textured, carried the stillness of Korean paper and porcelain, evoking emptiness as a space of potential.
Courtesy of LG OLED and the Park Seo-Bo Foundation
These were not conceptual gestures, but embodied experiences: colors lived, remembered and translated through the repetition of hand on paper. The paintings do not demand interpretation so much as invite In Colors Drawn from Nature, these paintings are shown alongside their digital counterparts on LG’s OLED screens. Here, technology does not seek to replicate surface or texture, but to extend perception into another register—the luminous, the immaterial, the fleeting. The curatorial choice to position an OLED transparent screen opposite traditional work, both seen through glass, underscores the shared conditions of looking.
Courtesy of LG OLED and the Park Seo-Bo Foundation
Paintings behind protective glass and digital light behind transparent screens become parallel experiences, reminding viewers that all art is mediated, and that mediation itself shapes how we see and feel. Park often inscribed the provenance of each work on the back of the canvas, and by enclosing them in transparent glass, the exhibition offers a rare 360-degree encounter with both the front image and the history inscribed behind it.
At the heart of the exhibition stands a T-shaped installation featuring LG’s latest OLED evo G5 and M5 televisions, which together present a newly conceived digital artwork by Je Baak, artist and professor at Seoul National University. Baak’s piece takes as its point of departure a formative moment for Park Seo-Bo: a walk beneath a canopy of autumn leaves so saturated in red that it overwhelmed the senses, an experience he later described as both humbling and profoundly healing. To honor that revelation, Baak turned to artificial intelligence as a collaborator, gathering countless variations of autumn-leaf red from images captured by people across the globe. These fragments of shared vision are then synthesized into a single, flowing monument—a collective portrait of nature’s color as filtered through both Park’s memory and the eyes of many others. In this way, the installation becomes not only a meditation on the transformative power of color but also a shared act of looking, extending Park’s private epiphany into a communal experience.
Colors Drawn from Nature: Park Seo-Bo and LG OLED in Dialogue
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