South Korea’s Gwangju Biennale, arguably the top biennial in Asia, has ended an art prize that was funded by the famed artist Park Seo-bo less than two years after it was founded.
The $100,000 prize, which was also named after Park, was intended to go to an artist in each edition of the show through 2042. It ended up being given out just once, to Oum Jeongsoon, who showed a large sculpture of an elephant without a trunk at the exhibition currently on view.
Park had underwritten the award through his GIZI Foundation, appropriating $1 million in funding for it.
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While the public had raised few concerns prior to the opening of the Gwangju Biennale in April, some leafleted the exhibition in objection to the prize. A small group of protesters claimed that Park’s art was at odds with the biennial’s political spirit and called for the end of the award.
“It is regrettable that the problem was raised on the day of the event,” Park wrote on Instagram on Wednesday. “I have a dream, which is to create my own art museum, regardless of size, to provide scholarship funds to support younger students, and to establish an art award. … However, I think I will have to proceed with my last dream in a different way. An agreement was reached with the Gwangju Biennale Foundation to abolish the Park Seo-Bo Art Prize.”
“In response to opposition to the ‘Gwangju Biennale Park Seo-Bo Art Prize’ that has emerged recently, the Gwangju Biennale Foundation sought diverse opinions from the art community regarding the award’s subsequent operational plans and continued discussions with the GIZI Foundation,” the biennial said in a statement. “The Gwangju Biennale Foundation first launched the prize sympathizing with Park Seo-Bo’s intention to support young artists. Following the discontinuation of the award, the Gwangju Biennale Foundation plans to consider opinions from different communities to establish a more progressive award system.”
Park is today most closely associated with the Dansaekhwa movement of the 1960s, whose purveyors relied upon minimalist abstraction that involved few colors, at times even producing monochromes. For his most famous series, the “Ecriture” paintings, Park drew thin lines on canvases that had not yet dried, leaving behind marks that sometimes looked like writing.
Detractors of his prize claimed that Park’s art, with its emphasis on formalism over political content, had little to do with everything the Gwangju Biennale stood for. Leaflets distributed at the biennial by protestors claimed that the biennial would’ve done better to name a prize after Oh Yoon, whose work of the ’80s, many done in the wake of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, explicitly took up political issues of the moment. Oh’s work is included in the current edition of the Gwangju Biennale, curated by Tate Modern senior curator Sook-Kyung Lee.
On its website, the Gwangju Biennale states that it was “founded in 1995 in memory of spirits of civil uprising of the 1980 repression of the Gwangju Democratization Movement.”
“Park Seo-bo (1931– ) pursued ‘art for art’s sake’ (Abstract Expressionism, Informel, Monochrome) throughout his life, remaining silent in the 1960’s 4.19 movement, conforming to the 5.16 military regime in the 1970s, and ignoring the [anti-democratic] Yushin regime in the 1970s and the democratization movement in the 1980s,” the leaflets read.
Then, listing off the various honors bestowed upon Park, it goes on, “He was a thorough aesthetic modernist artist who lived for personal glory.”
This view was also also espoused by other artists in South Korea during the ’80s, who turned to realism as a retort to the abstraction peddled by the Dansaekhwa artists. As historian Chunghoon Shin wrote in a 2020 survey of Korean art, the abstract mode “came to be seen as narrowly formalistic and self-referential.”
Park had previously addressed these leaflets and associated banners on Instagram, calling them a “one-man protest.” He wrote, “The [framework] is outdated and there is no realistic alternative. If you want to assert a different idea, you need to study more.”
The Gwangju Biennale, which has so far not commented publicly on the Park Seo-bo Art Prize, seemed to endorse Park’s position, leaving behind a heart emoji in the comments.
News of the termination of the Park Seo-bo Art Prize arrived the same day that the Gwangju Biennale announced that Nicolas Bourriaud would curate its 2025 edition. Best known for terming relational aesthetics as something akin to an art movement, Bourriaud is well-known in the biennial circuit, having most recently done the 2019 Istanbul Biennial. The release for his appointment as artistic director did not mention Park or his award.
Update, 5/11/23, 10 a.m.: A statement from the Gwangju Biennale has been added to this article.