Écriture No. 71-78 (Writing no. 71-78)

Park Seo-bo describes his Écriture Series as "journey of hand," which is basically a controlled automatism. Take Écriture No. 71-78 (Lot 499) and Écriture No. 77-74 (Lot 500) for instance. He first applies a thick layer of white oil paint, and, before it gets dry, draws onto the oil layer with a pencil. He adapts a specific form for every painting, forming a kind of pattern with repetitive form. Although he sometimes uses drastically undulating curves, he mostly prefers parallel long or short lines. As he draws with pencil by bare hand, a sense of spontaneity is thus formed, resembling automatism to some extent. Moreover, since the penciled lines vary with the application of strength, some sections may be clearly incised and some section tend to be blurry; the paint plowed up along with the drawing process also varies in thickness, and hence incurs in the viewer a vague sense of emotional agitation. In addition, as the incised pencil lines furrow out and pile up the wet oil paint, a rugged surface is formed.
Undeniably, Park Seo-bo's Ecriture Series reflects the automatism of Dada and Surrealism, but it also reflects to some extent Chinese traditional calligraphy, particularly the rhythmic undulation of the running and cursive scripts. His creative idea does combine the aesthetic idea of traditional calligraphy and ideology of modern art. The practice of incising on the wet oil paint by pencil to form concave and convex surface, moreover, also reflects the inlaid white porcelains that shortly appeared in the Joseon Dynasty (Fig. 1), such as White Porcelain Jar Inlaid with Tang-Dynasty Vegetation Patterns in the collection of the National Museum of Korea, Seoul.