Forty years is a long time to stay with one body of work. Yet if Park has chosen to remain with the “Ecriture” series for so long, it is because of his belief in painting as a medium whose possibilities are best realized when subjected to particular limitations. His is a fundamentalist belief in painting, one he maintained in spite of those in more recognized parts of the international art world who in the 1970s rushed to declare painting dead on arrival. In Korea, Park’s fundamentalist stance won him no friends among those who equated devotion to form with apolitical indifference. And in an age still coming to terms with postmodernism’s free-for-all, many might wonder at Park’s insistence on abstraction and its possibilities. We may even call it an instance of blind faith. But as Park Seobo’s rich and complex body of work reminds us, sometimes blind faith is exactly what we need most in order to see clearly.
- Joan Kee(Professor of History of Art at Michigan State University)

To recoup abstraction, we must be prepared to restore our faith in art’s potential to stand for something outside our everyday social reality. And to appreciate unfamiliar abstract art, we must be able to simultaneously link and detach the work before us from the history it may have worked through. According to one reading, Park Seo-Bo epitomizes “Korean monochrome painting” as perhaps the only contemporary art movement in the world that is so purely construed as an ethical practice. According to another reading, his works could be anonymous, nation-less thresholds to a “space of many dimensions.”