Dansaekhwa and Western Minimalism: A Dialogue of Form and Spirit
The seemingly kindred visual language of Dansaekhwa (Korean monochrome painting) and Western Minimalism presents a compelling case study in global art history, where similar aesthetics belie profoundly different cultural, philosophical, and artistic intentions. While both movements favor monochromatic palettes, repetition, and a reductive approach to form, their core objectives mark them as distinct phenomena—one a pursuit of objecthood and perception, the other a practice of process and meditation.
The Aesthetics of Austerity: Visual Parallels
Emerging in the US and Europe in the 1960s, Western Minimalism, exemplified by artists like Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, and Robert Ryman, sought to strip art of illusionism, narrative, and the “artist’s hand.” The resulting “Specific Objects” were cool, geometric, and often industrially fabricated, emphasizing the work’s literal presence in space and its relationship to the viewer’s perception. The repetition in Judd’s stacks or the unified color of an Agnes Martin grid aimed for an almost impersonal purity and an acknowledgement of the work’s thing-ness.
Contemporaneously, the Dansaekhwa movement—active in South Korea from the late 1960s through the 1970s—also embraced a minimalist appearance. Artists like Park Seo-Bo, Ha Chong-Hyun, and Chung Sang-Hwa used subdued, earthy tones, often white or off-white, and employed repetitive actions on the canvas. Visually, a monochrome by Yun Hyong-keun might share the quiet austerity of a Western Minimalist canvas. Yet, the similarities are largely superficial, a point that misreadings of Dansaekhwa as a derivative of the West have only recently corrected.
Philosophical Bedrock: The Divergence of Intention
The critical divergence lies in the movements’ philosophical and conceptual foundations.
Western Minimalism: Logic and Objecthood
Western Minimalism arose as a radical rejection of Abstract Expressionism’s emotional drama. It was rooted in an American rationalist and materialist tradition, concerned with seriality, industrial fabrication, and challenging the illusionistic plane. Donald Judd’s famous essay, “Specific Objects,” argued for works that were neither painting nor sculpture but existed as autonomous, un-authored objects. The focus was exterior: on the object’s physical reality, its materials (like steel, plywood, or fluorescent tubes), and the viewer’s optical experience of it. It was a formalist, analytical reduction.
Dansaekhwa: Process and Self-Cultivation
Dansaekhwa, which translates to “monochrome painting,” was born out of a turbulent post-Korean War socio-political climate. Its monochromatic discipline was not merely a formal choice but a path toward spiritual and emotional transcendence, a quiet rebellion against political oppression, and a search for a distinct Korean modern identity. Rooted in Eastern philosophies—particularly Taoism, Buddhism, and the meditative tradition of calligraphy—the movement emphasizes process over product, and the physical, repetitive labor of the artist.
- Process as Meditation: For Park Seo-Bo’s Écriture series, the repeated drawing of pencil lines into a wet oil-paint ground is a slow, meditative act aimed at self-purification and the integration of the artist with the material. This is an internal, spiritual focus, a profound contrast to the Western Minimalist aim of eliminating the artist’s subjective hand.
- Materiality and Nature: Dansaekhwa artists often use materials with profound traditional and tactile significance, such as hanji (traditional Korean mulberry paper) or hemp, embracing the accidental textures and the material’s innate qualities. Ha Chong-Hyun‘s practice of pushing thick paint through the back of a coarsely woven canvas (baeapbub) highlights a physical confrontation with the medium, allowing the material itself to determine the final form, a concept aligned with Taoist ideas of natural flow and non-action (wu-wei).
The Role of the Artist and the Surface
The way each movement treats the artist and the artwork’s surface clarifies their difference. Western Minimalists sought to make their art appear neutral and anonymous, often using industrial techniques to remove any trace of the subjective hand. The surface is treated as a flat, neutral field—a conceptual plane.
Dansaekhwa, conversely, makes the process-trace highly visible and central. The scraped, folded, smeared, or repainted surfaces of a Dansaekhwa work are a record of time, rhythm, and the artist’s repeated bodily engagement. The monochrome in Dansaekhwa is not a single, flat hue but a dense layering of textures and variations within a color range, inviting a haptic, tactile engagement from the viewer. It speaks not of a cold, analytic reduction, but of a laborious, quiet accumulation that dissolves the ego into the material itself.
In essence, Western Minimalism’s reduction is a conceptual act of subtraction leading to object-as-idea, while Dansaekhwa’s monochrome is a meditative act of accumulation leading to a revelation of spirit and material essence. The former sought an objective truth in the world of the object; the latter sought a subjective truth in the profound relationship between human action, material, and nature. Their shared visual austerity is merely the starting point for two radically divergent philosophical journeys.
