Dansaekhwa: The Korean monochrome movement

Dansaekhwa is an influential movement of Korean monochrome painting that emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s as an attempt to reconcile the influence of Western modernism with Korean artistic culture and philosophy. The name literally means monochrome painting. Its artists worked mostly in muted, neutral palettes of white, beige, earth tones and grey, focusing not on depiction but on process and materiality. They repeated simple actions over and over: applying and scraping paint, pushing through the canvas from behind, soaking fabric in pigment, or pulling out the threads of the weave. These ritualistic, meditative gestures reflected Daoist and Buddhist ideas of patience, emptiness and the unity of hand, material and time. Key figures included Park Seo-bo, Chung Sang-hwa, Ha Chong-hyun, Lee Ufan and Yun Hyong-keun. Dansaekhwa was the first Korean movement to achieve international recognition and is still regarded as Korea's foundational contribution to the global history of abstraction, showing how a national spiritual tradition could renew the language of modernism.