The Brooklyn Rail

“In the history of art, late works are the catastrophes.”
—Theodor Adorno, “Late Style in Beethoven” (1937)

Late works, the philosopher Theodor Adorno insisted, should not be relegated to the category of mere document of an uninhibited personality. On the contrary, the dissonant and fragmentary topography of the late style manifests precisely in the mystical bonds it forms with time—with what preceded it and what will have followed—and therefore with Being as a whole.

Adorno’s words resound profoundly in the face of Park Seo-Bo’s Newspaper Ecritures. This final body of work by the late master of Tansaekhwa—undeniably the best-known contemporary Korean art movement in the West—is shown for the first time at White Cube New York, just over a year after Park’s passing. Across two floors of the gallery, twenty-six newspaper paintings from this recent series are interspersed with six “Ecritures” from 1996–2000. The earlier works’ disciplinary restraint only casts the late works’ quivering strokes in sharper relief: the former are solemn and measured, the latter spontaneous and scattered. In these late pieces, the artist’s hand—which Park had labored for a lifetime to erase—is finally freed from all desires for mastery: lines and dots remain as they are, exposed as the raw constituents of his art, naked at last.

Months before his diagnosis with stage three lung cancer in early 2023, Park decided to revisit an idea from his time as a young artist in Paris in the early 1970s. Then living in a hotel in Montparnasse, Park would recycle newspapers left in the corridors, using them to clean his brushes. Drawn to the way his brush marks obscured the news coverage, he made these to send to his wife and friends as gifts. Half a century later, he recreated these pieces using vintage newspapers sourced by his assistants, which he then worked over repeatedly with white oil paint—brushing, dripping, and incising with pencils and blunt tools—in a characteristically linear manner more akin to writing than painting (hence the all-encompassing title and frequent comparisons to Cy Twombly).

The full significance of écriture, as Susan Sontag tells us, “relies on a special inflection of the French word that has no equivalent in the English.” Originally denoting “handwriting” and the “art of writing,” écriture has come to refer to the ensemble of features of a literary work, such as tone, ethos, rhythm, style, and all traces of the writer’s actions that constitute the work’s identity. Sontag’s definition of écriture is particularly apt here, since Park’s gestures are no longer systematized into the self-effacing formations of his early works, but are now truly indexical, both synchronically—of the duration of making—and diachronically—of a culminating point in the artist’s life that necessarily contains all that had come before. The scratched “commas” in a work like Ecriture No.221011 (2022), for instance, reiterate an inaugural moment in Park’s early career: when Park’s three-year-old son, frustrated by his failed attempts to write hangul within the orthographic grid, scribbled long lines on the now-crumpled page—an episode that first inspired Park’s method.

Indeed, the artist’s deployment of the procedures of writing and the mass circulation tabloid within and over the very mediums of painting (oil paint, the canvas) annuls the foundational dichotomies that have governed the Western tradition of art: figure/ground, text/image, art/mass culture. His inscriptions are simultaneously acts of erasure, like drawings on snow or sand. In this case, too, these hybrid operations (at once spatial and temporal) produce an excess of time, which is further eternalized in the works’ serial titles, each recording the date on which the piece was made. Yet unlike the deadpan objectivity of On Kawara’s “Today” series (1966–2013), where the artist makes himself a passive cataloguer of time, Park’s gestural marks index his physical condition and labor as they were implicated in the production of time against itself.

Why else return to the newspaper pieces, after all, if not for the material’s distinct relation to mortality? As a temporal record, the daily newspaper testifies to the present in its process of becoming the past (“that-is-no-more”). Here, Park has selected issues according to dates of personal significance, such as his or his wife’s birthdays. Despite the heavily worked surface, textual fragments occasionally seep through the paint, some barely (but just about) legible: a French report on North Africa in the aftermath of the Algerian War, a Korean advert for an anti-acne balm, an American advert for the Boeing 707 jetliner. Taking newspapers as the base of his activity, Park sought to conjoin his life to the rest of history through a symbolic network of spatiotemporal correspondences. The works themselves, then, stand as the crucial witnesses to his ultimate intervention in the collective psyche; it is this dually retroactive and proactive force that makes Newspaper Ecritures “catastrophic.”

But newspapers were not the only items Park collected diligently—his vast archive also includes diaries, press clippings, photographs, and letters, all meticulously cataloged, photocopied, and bound into albums. For Park, documentation as a technique of repetition—just like his painting practice—was also a quest for certainty and transcendence in times of crisis (the Korean War, the subsequent political turbulence, and his terminal illness). Art, for him, was akin to praying or breathing: “I just keep going until there is no more strength left in me and when I feel my energy is no more,” Park once said in an interview with the gallery. “When I feel that I cannot do any more, then the work is done. The human is a wise animal.”