FRIEZE 2025 LG OLED kindles Park Seo-bo’s nature-born hues at Frieze Seoul
Installation view of "Park Seo‑Bo X LG OLED TV: Colors Drawn from Nature" at this year's Frieze Seoul at Coex / Courtesy of LG Electronics
Park Seo-bo (1931-2023), the late master of monochrome “dansaekhwa,” devoted his life to the “Ecriture” series — a meditative journey that shifted and transformed across half a century.
It began in the early 1970s with “pencil-Ecriture,” inspired by the crude penmanship of his 3-year-old son. In those hesitant marks, Park discovered a philosophy of repetition and self-emptying.
Three decades later, one autumn at Mount Bandai in Fukushima Prefecture, Japan, he stood before a ravine ablaze with crimson maples. The vision pierced his grayscale world, and color began to pour into his canvases, marking the birth of “color-Ecriture.”
The hues he carried back were not abstract inventions but drawn directly from the earth: the black of soot of an old kitchen hearth, the yellow blaze of Jeju Island’s canola fields, the purple-red of wine, the orange of ripened persimmon and the tender pink of azaleas.
Installation view of "Park Seo‑Bo X LG OLED TV: Colors Drawn from Nature" at this year's Frieze Seoul / Courtesy of LG Electronics
These vibrant, nature-infused works now take the spotlight in “Park Seo‑Bo X LG OLED TV: Colors Drawn from Nature,” an exhibition at Coex in southern Seoul, staged as part of this year’s Frieze Seoul fair.
The show juxtaposes Park’s originals with LG OLED “digital canvases,” where self-lit pixels render his hues with striking fidelity in tone and depth. In this setting, the painter’s “color-Ecriture” series enters into dialogue with its luminous doubles, as if his nature-born hues had found a second life upon the electronic screen.
As the headline partner of Frieze Seoul, LG OLED has been bringing to the fair these kinds of digital reimaginings of Korean masters — from the lyrical modernist Kim Whanki (1913-74) to ink abstractionist Suh Se-ok (1929-2020).
The fourth iteration of Frieze Seoul, which opened with a VIP preview on Wednesday, continues through Saturday.
A view of Parkseobo Foundation, formerly known as the Gizi Foundation, in Seoul's Yeonhui-dong / Korea Times photo by Park Han-sol
This year’s collaboration with LG marks the first undertaking of the Parkseobo Foundation, formerly known as the Gizi Foundation, since Park’s passing in October 2023, according to Park Seung-ho, its chairperson and the artist’s son.
No formal exhibition has taken place since then, in observance of the Korean tradition of “jang,” a three-year grieving period for one’s parents, he explained Tuesday in Seoul’s Yeonhui-dong.
“We are in the midst of constructing the Park Seo-bo Museum Seoul, a three-story venue next to the foundation’s building, set to open next year,” the younger Park told The Korea Times.
The museum, he added, will showcase not only Park’s own works but also those of artists in dialogue with his “Ecriture” series, alongside younger, emerging voices.