The ‘Hereditarius’ works immediately predate Park’s best-known ‘Ecriture’ series. Colourful geometric abstractions, they feature an illusionistic sense of space, layering shapes and stripes in bright red, dark blue, green and yellow, mixed with white, and pairing straight with curvilinear lines or hard-edged with rounded forms. Around this time Park was experimenting with new forms, drawing inspiration from both Pop Art and Op Art. He combines geometric abstraction with Obangsaek, a traditional Korean colour spectrum in which colours symbolise the elements and cardinal directions, signalling his interest in evolving a modernism infused with an authentically Korean aesthetic which was later to inform Dansaekhwa.

In the late-1960s Park embarked on the series for which he is best known, and which has remained his focus for the past sixty years. These are the works known by the term ‘Ecriture’, borrowed from the French word for writing, though Park uses the Korean ‘Myobop’, derived from the Chinese characters ‘to draw’ and ‘a method’. The artist recounts how he watched his toddler son attempting to form characters on the gridded paper used by Korean school children, in imitation of his older brother. Unable to stay within the lines, the child scribbled over his marks in frustration, then furiously attempted to erase them. His son’s struggles reminded Park of the instruction ‘to surrender and erase all traces of my ordeals again and again’ which had been given to him by the Buddhist teacher Kim Iryeop a decade before. This was the genesis of a meditative practice whereby Park set out to submit his prodigious, restless energy to an arduous programme of spiritual self-improvement, akin to the scholar-monks of ancient Korean tradition. For Park, art is a tool for spiritual development. Executed within a single sitting, harnessing an energy flow through repetitive action, the artwork is not the creation of an image but is the residue of a process of self-discipline integrating action, mind and matter.

When applied on to a canvas backing and soaked with water or acrylic, the hanji reverted to a pulp that could be pushed and scraped into sculptural forms. Using sharp pieces of bamboo, fluted lead sticks or sometimes just his own hand, Park at first incised multiple zig zag strokes or diagonal lines to create dynamic compositions, adding additional pigment during the final step. From 1997, the ‘Black and White’ works mark Park’s arrival at the technique he has employed ever since; of working the wet hanji into deep parallel grooves and ridges, which he likens to the furrows of a newly-ploughed field. In these works, Park enacts a painterly reversal, allowing the materiality of the paper to speak for itself rather than simply being the support, and for colour to emerge through the space of action. ‘My pieces are products of a dynamic harmony between the material properties of hanji and my Myobop technique,’ he has said.

In the ‘Colour Ecriture’ works, which date from 2000s onwards, Park began using vivid colours, marking a sharp transition from the neutral tones of earlier paintings. This shift in colour palette was inspired by nature, prompted, in particular, by a visit to Japan in 2000 where he experienced the exuberant autumn colours around Mount Bandai near Fukushima. Observing that hanji, unlike Western papers, absorbs rather than reflects colour, in these works, Park handles the paper while still wet and flexible, repetitively furrowing lines into its surface to create a rippled, sculptural effect, with alternating ridges and crevices. Once dry, the main colour pigment is applied over the surface, and the crevices infilled with a shade several tones darker. Taken directly from nature, these colours are vibrant, mixed by Park himself and directly connected to his observations of maple leaves, cherry blossom, jade or even air. Within the compositions, smooth rectangular areas or ‘windows’ of single colour offer a textural contrast and a ‘breathing hole’, to let the mind rest.