Kon Young-Woo, Untitled, 1984, gouache, Chinese ink on Korean paper, 259 x 162 cm. Courtesy of the artist’s estate and Kukje Gallery Artist: 박서보 (Park Seo-Bo), 권영우 (Kwon Young-Woo), 하종현 (Ha Chong-Hyun) Website: https://www.centrepompidou.fr/en/collections/visual-arts The Centre Pompidou in Paris recently announced that it will add works by three of Korea’s most celebrated modern artists, Park Seo-Bo, Kwon Young-Woo, and Ha Chong-Hyun, to its permanent collection. The Centre Pompidou, widely recognized as one of the three largest museums in France along with the Louvre and the Musée d'Orsay, houses one of the world’s most celebrated modern and contemporary art collection of approximately 120,000 works, encompassing visual art, photography, new media, film, and design. Considered the largest in Europe, the museum’s collection comes second only to that owned by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.  The four works that will become part of the Centre Pompidou’s permanent collection include: two colored hanji works by Kwon Young-Woo; one work from Park Seo-Bo’s color Écriture series; and one work from Ha Chong-Hyun’s signature Conjunction series. All three artists celebrated as masters of Dansaekhwa—the seminal art movement that emerged in postwar Korea and showcased a unique form of Korean modernism—the addition of these works to the Centre Pompidou’s permanent collection not only reinforces the representation of Korean art within the global art scene, but also provides an important point of departure for extensive art-historical discourse surrounding the movement.  Kwon Young-Woo's two signature colored hanji works from the 1980s, Untitled (1984) and Untitled (1986), feature surfaces repeatedly punctured with numerous holes, that are then saturated with ink that fills in the spaces in distinctive patterns. Painted with both Western (gouache) and Eastern (Chinese ink) mediums, these works showcase the artistry with which Kwon allowed color to permeate into the paper’s torn edges. These paintings provide a backdrop for the unpredictable encounter between the paper and ink, thereby effectively highlighting the materiality of hanji. Distinguished by its simple yet dynamic aesthetic, Park Seo-Bo's Écriture (描法) No. 120103 (2012) belongs to the artist's late Écriture series which reflects a uniquely Korean spirituality. The series, often also referred to as “color Écriture” due to its vibrant palette, gives insight to Park’s technical approach and philosophy of becoming unified with nature, thus emptying the mind and achieving a higher level of awareness. Ha Chong-Hyun’s Conjunction 85-022 (1985) demonstrates Ha’s exploration of his internationally celebrated technique of bae-ap-bup, a singular method of pushing paint from the back to the front of the burlap canvas. Thick layers of paint that seep through the front are liberally transformed by the artist using a wide range of tools such as knives, brushes, and wooden spatulas, which Ha appropriately modifies in order to create patterns that accentuate the pictorial plane; achieved through this process is the “conjunction” between material and performance. Dansaekhwa has become synonymous with a generation of artists who experienced first-hand the social and political upheaval in 1970s Korea, and who fought for a more liberal approach to visual art practice. Specifically, these artists expanded studio practice to incorporate the language of performance on various two-dimensional surfaces, adopting innovative and often unorthodox technical methods as well as a meditative philosophical perspective. Since its establishment, Kukje Gallery has supported important Dansaekhwa artists including Kwon Young-Woo, Park Seo-Bo, Ha Chong-Hyun, and Lee Ufan. As a part of the “Collateral Events” at the Venice Biennale in 2015, the gallery mounted an unprecedented exhibition of Dansaekhwa artists, celebrating these important figures and providing essential context to recognize their historical contributions. The following year, the gallery launched another special exhibition in collaboration with the Boghossian Foundation in Brussels, titled When Process Becomes Form: Dansaekhwa and Korean Abstraction. In 2018, Shanghai’s Powerlong Museum opened Korean Abstract Art: Kim Whanki and Dansaekhwa, the first-ever comprehensive exhibition of Korean abstract art to be held in China, which established a platform for continued dialogue on the aesthetic impact and ongoing importance of Dansaekhwa internationally.