Dansaekhwa has taken over the modern art world. But the story of how that happened is up for debate.

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Dansaekhwa has taken over the modern art world. But the story of how that happened is up for debate.

Published: 26 May. 2026, 07:00

LIM JEONG-WON
[email protected]

Audio report: written by reporters, read by AI

Art collectors and buyers are seen at a Christie's auction on Korean dansaekhwa artist Kim Whan-ki's works at a venue in Hong Kong in 2019. [JOONGANG ILBO]

By now, everyone should have heard of dansaekhwa, the Korean monochrome style of painting which has set sale records at global auctions and created a buying trend among collectors. Its muted yet intensive and meditative abstraction has mesmerized global art audiences over the past decade and come to define Korean modern art.

But the global rise of dansaekhwa also raises a larger question: Why did this particular genre become the face of Korean art? And what comes next?

Most of the paintings now circulating under the name dansaekhwa are more than 50 years old. Park Seo-bo’s “Ecriture” series, Chung Sang-hwa’s grids of cut and re-pasted paint, Ha Chong-hyun’s “Conjunction” works pushed through the back of hemp canvas — these were being made in Seoul in the 1970s, by artists who would not see significant international sales for another four decades. The term itself isn’t new either; art critic Lee Yil was already using the word dansaekhwa around 1980.

What changed however was not the work. It was who was paying attention.

The shift of attention on dansaekhwa is usually dated to 2014, when two exhibitions opened on opposite sides of the world within months of each other: “Dansaekhwa” at Kukje Gallery in Seoul, in time with the Gwangju Biennale that year, and “From All Sides: Tansaekhwa on Abstraction” at Blum & Poe in Los Angeles, curated by the art historian Joan Kee.

A collector is seen in front of ″Tranquility 5-IV-73 #310″ (1973) by Korean dansaekhwa artist Kim Whan-ki at an auction in Seoul on April 9, 2017. [K AUCTION]

Between 2013 and 2017, auction prices for works by Park, Chung, Ha and Lee Ufan rose dramatically at Christie’s and Sotheby’s sales, culminating with one particular work by Kim Whan-ki fetching $13 million at a Hong Kong auction in 2019, the highest price ever paid for a Korean artwork to date. The galleries that had been showing these artists for decades — Kukje, Hyundai, Tina Kim, Blum & Poe — suddenly found themselves at the center of a market story.

How that story came together is, depending on whom you ask, either a long-overdue correction or the result of a very specific organizational strategy that began in Seoul in the 1970s.

A movement, or an assembled category?

Kee, director of New York University's Institute of Fine Arts and author of “Contemporary Korean Art: Tansaekhwa and the Urgency of Method” (2013), the first English-language scholarly book on the subject, has pushed back on the idea that the rise of dansaekhwa in 2014 was an engineered moment.

“The galleries involved weren’t assembling a movement to sell — they had longstanding, artist-specific commitments,” Kee told the Korea JoongAng Daily. “Kukje had been working with Lee Ufan long before 2014. Hyundai had a deep relationship with Chung going back years.”

What happened in 2014, in Kee’s account, was convergence rather than coordination. The two exhibitions were conceived independently. The Kukje show caught international audiences traveling through Seoul on the way to Gwangju; the Blum & Poe show was seen by the adviser Allan Schwartzman, whose interest helped place a Ha work in MoMA’s collection in New York.

Koo Jin-kyung, a professor at Gachon University whose doctoral dissertation traced dansaekhwa as an organized project, sees the same period differently.

″Ecriture No.161231″ by Korean dansaekhwa artist Park Seo-Bo [JOONGANG ILBO]

For Koo, it was not simply a coherent aesthetic that the world eventually recognized. It was, in her phrase, the product of “choice and focus,” selection and concentration — a deliberate strategy pursued by Korean art institutions and galleries beginning in the 1970s.

“Dansaekhwa was not naturally chosen by the art world,” Prof. Koo said. “The Korean art scene at the time consciously selected it as the representative tendency it could present on the international stage, and then repeatedly exhibited it abroad and at home.”

Koo points to the “Independents” and “Ecole de Seoul” exhibitions, both established under Park’s leadership at the Korean Fine Arts Association, as a filtering system: Emerging artists were recruited into a stylistic mainstream and sent abroad — to the Cagnes International Painting Festival, the India Triennale and the São Paulo Biennale — to represent Korea’s contemporary face.

“Park’s organizational power was the core engine that allowed dansaekhwa to be recognized as Korea’s representative art in such a short time,” Koo argued.

″Heaven and Earth″ (1973) by Korean dansaekhwa artist Kim Whan-ki [JOONGANG ILBO]

Another perspective sits between the two. Chung Yeon-shim, a professor of art history at Hongik University, agrees with Kee that the discourse existed long before the market did — “people think dansaekhwa started in 2012, but it didn’t,” according to Prof. Chung.

“In the past it was called monochrome painting or one-color painting, and it existed as a movement in art criticism,” Chung added.

But she also describes the 2010s rise as unusually unified.

“Art historical interest and market interest aligned, which is almost the only case of that in Korea,” Prof. Chung said. “If you only have market interest, that kind of art doesn’t last. Prices form, prices fall, people lose interest. That is why critical discourse really matters, and for dansaekhwa, that alignment was unusual.”

Korean dansaekhwa artist Kim Whan-ki's works are seen at Seokpajeong Seoul Art Museum in Jongno District, central Seoul on June 12, 2024. [NEWS1]

Why dansaekhwa, and not something else?

Korean art in the 1970s and 80s was not just one thing. There were the “Art Informel” painters of the late 1950s and 60s, working with thick gestural impasto in the wake of the Korean War. There were geometric abstractionists. There were the experimental artists working with installation, objects and performance. And there was minjung art, the politically charged painting and printmaking movement of the 1980s, made in direct opposition to authoritarian rule. None of these had anything close to dansaekhwa’s eventual global reach.

Prof. Koo’s answer is structural. Minjung art, she points out, was suppressed by the same military governments that supported dansaekhwa’s international travel.

“Dansaekhwa excluded political color and put forward pure abstraction and Eastern spirituality, which did not conflict with the government’s cultural revival policy at the time,” Koo said. “That’s why it received institutional backing and support for international exhibitions.”

Korean dansaekhwa artist Lee Ufan's works are seen on display at the San Marco Art Centre in Venice, Italy on May 11. [JOONGANG ILBO]

Minjung art, by contrast, required the viewer to understand a specific Korean political history — the authoritarian Yushin system, the May 18 Gwangju Democratization Movement, labor struggles — that did not travel easily through the conventions of the global contemporary art market.

There is also the question of medium. Prof. Chung notes that experimental art rarely sells.

“Experimental art is just that, too experimental — unless a museum collects it, it’s very difficult for an individual collector to do so,” she said. “Personal collectors want flat work. You can’t put complicated installations in your house. Dansaekhwa is flat, so the market’s interest was higher.”

Kee complicates the picture in another direction. The premise that overtly political work has been invisible internationally is itself wrong, she argues.

“Minjung art has had overseas exhibitions for decades — including at Artists Space in New York, one of the most important alternative spaces in the world — and institutions like the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum have been collecting it seriously for years,” Kee said. “The problem isn’t invisibility. The problem is a tendency to conflate blue-chip gallery attention with art historical significance.”

A media facade announcing a special exhibition on Korean dansaekhwa artist Park Seo-bo in collaboration with LG Electronics at Frieze Seoul 2025 is seen at Times Square in New York on Aug. 24, 2025. [YONHAP]

The Japan question

One of the most under-discussed parts of the dansaekhwa story is that it did not travel directly from Seoul to overseas.

Long before global institutions paid attention, Japanese galleries and critics — the Tokyo Gallery, Nakahara Yusuke and the American painter Joseph Love, who lived in Japan for 36 years — were already showing and discussing Korean monochrome painting. The 1975 Tokyo Gallery exhibition “Korea: Five Artists, Five Hinsaek — White” is often cited as the international debut of what would later be called dansaekhwa.

“Going directly to the U.S. or Europe at the time would have required information, networks and an institutional foundation that Korea didn’t have,” Prof. Koo said. “Japan was the realistic intermediate route, which I called in my dissertation the bridgehead of internationalization.”

Key artists of the dansaekhwa movement are seen at a studio in this file photo from 1979. From left, Lee Ufan, Yun Hyong-keun, Kim Tschang-yeul and Park Seo-bo. [JOONGANG ILBO]

Lee Ufan — Korean-born, based in Japan, central to the mono movement — was, in both Koo's and Prof. Chung’s accounts, the irreplaceable connector who linked Seoul to the Tokyo Gallery network.

“Park [Seo-bo] was in Seoul, Kim Tschang-yeul was in Paris, Kim Whan-ki was in New York, Lee [Ufan] was in Tokyo,” Prof. Chung said. “They served as really important bridgeheads for international exchange.”

Kee, on the other hand, wants to retire the bridge metaphor.

“What mattered wasn’t Japan as a conduit, but what Korean artists built through their friendships and working relationships in Tokyo specifically,” Kee said.

The exchange, she insists, ran both ways. Japanese artists showed at the Daegu Contemporary Art Festival; the conversation was peer-to-peer, not pipeline.

Korean dansaekhwa artist Lee Ufan is seen in this file photo [JOONGANG ILBO]

What got left out?

The international canon of dansaekhwa narrowed quickly around a small group: Park Seo-bo, Lee Ufan, Chung Sang-hwa, Yun Hyong-keun and Ha Chong-hyun. All men. Prof. Koo identifies a counter-history that has been almost entirely lost — a group of five women painters trained at Hongik held annual “White” exhibitions at Myeongdong Gallery starting in 1972, working in clear dialogue with the same monochrome tendencies.

“Not one of these women was included in the 1975 Tokyo Gallery exhibition, and they were continuously excluded from dansaekhwa discourse afterward,” Koo said.

Behind that exclusion was a male-centered notion of tradition that quietly assimilated abstract painting to the lineage of literati ink — a lineage from which women had long been written out.

Korean dansaekhwa artist Park Seo-bo is seen in this file photo [JOONGANG ILBO]

Chung elaborates on the cleanliness of the exclusion story. There were women working in dansaekhwa modes, she says, naming Lee Jeong-ji, Jin Ok-sun, and Yoon Mi-ran. Still, many disappeared from the record. Some stopped working after marriage. Some never received the institutional support their male peers did.

There were also entirely different abstractions running parallel: Lee Seong-ja, working in France with a diasporic and explicitly feminine sensibility; Bang Hai-ja’s expressionist abstraction; and the painters of the late 1980s who deliberately rejected the monochrome idiom.

“Korean art is dynamic, the diversity of expression is enormous,” Prof. Chung said. “Reading it as a single movement after about 1980 becomes very difficult.”

Kee is sharper still on what the success of dansaekhwa has revealed about the institutions doing the looking.

“There is still a shocking degree of parochialism in European and American art worlds — an ‘all looks the same’ mentality that treats proximity in geography or ethnicity as proximity in meaning,” Kee said. “It’s an intellectual failure, and it persists.”

Korean dansaekhwa artist Kim Whan-ki's works are seen on display at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) in central Seoul on Aug. 13, 2025. [YONHAP]

And what comes next?

The three experts disagree on a great deal — on whether dansaekhwa was a movement or a category retrospectively consolidated, on whether Western readings flattened the work or finally caught up to it and on whether the Japan story is a bridge or a peer conversation. What they share, however, is the sense that the dansaekhwa moment, whatever it was, has run its useful course as a master narrative for Korean modern art.

Kee, who has spent more of her career than most defending the work’s specificity against generalized notions of Asian-ness, is direct about it.

“Legibility to Western institutions is not the measure of significance,” Kee said. “It never was.”

The lasting consequence she names is not the auction records but the fact that “Seoul has become its own worldmaking site; we don’t need New York or Paris to tell us what Korean art is or isn’t.”

Prof. Chung wants the next phase of research to be about individuals, not groupings.

″From Lines″ (1974) by Korean dansaekhwa artist Lee Ufan, left, is seen at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) Seoul main branch in Jongno District, central Seoul on April 30, 2025. [YONHAP]

“Within dansaekhwa, the artists’ methodologies are all different,” Chung said. “It’s very hard to bind them into a unified narrative. There are commonalities, but I am a little averse to tying it into one story.”

She points to the recent attention being given at the Guggenheim and Tate Modern to the Korean experimental art of the 1960s and 70s that the dansaekhwa label had kept in shadow.

Prof. Koo ends in roughly the same place, saying that “through the channel of internationalization that dansaekhwa opened up, Korean art’s real diversity and multilayered narrative is now beginning to be recognized in global criticism.”

“We are entering a paradigm shift,” she pointed out.

The dansaekhwa paintings, in the meantime, are still here, still rewarding attention. What is shifting is the story told around them — and the assumption that any one story and explanation regarding it will do.

BY LIM JEONG-WON [[email protected]]