UK Edition
The Dansaekhwa bubble? 1970s Korean art phenomenon sees meteoric rise
Octogenarian artists rejoice! If you were part of a neglected or forgotten art movement in your youth, your time has come. Dealers, collectors, museum curators, art fair organisers and, of course, auctioneers are all looking around for the next big thing – which includes what got missed 50 years ago.
A case in point is the Korean art phenomenon termed Dansaekhwa – a contemplative style of subtly layered and textured minimalist abstract monochrome painting that sprung up in the 1970s while Korea was under a repressive, dictatorial regime.
Until two years ago, the exponents of this aesthetic were rarely seen in the UK. The exception was its leader, Lee Ufan, who left Korea for Tokyo, and has been represented in the west by the Lisson Gallery in London and the Pace Gallery in New York. Lee’s work made an explosive entrance onto the western market back in 2006 when one of his paintings fetched a triple-estimate record $140,000 at auction. A retrospective exhibition at the Guggenheim in New York fuelled interest, and in 2014 his auction record, $2.2 million, was set.
Inevitably, other artists associated with Dansaekhwa have emerged. They had been relatively successful in Korea, but not exposed to the global market before. Galleries with close interests in Asian art like Blum & Poe in Los Angeles, Tina Kim in New York, and Axel Vervoordt in Belgium sowed the seeds placing them in juxtaposition with Western minimalist artists like Robert Ryman, Agnes Martin or Cy Twombly whose prices dwarfed theirs.
Over the last two years, London has taken up the baton. In the summer of 2015, Katharine Kostyal, a partner in the White Cube gallery, returned from the Venice Biennale deeply impressed by an exhibition she had seen there, and persuaded another leading Dansaekhwa artist, Park Seo-bo, to give her enough works to make his first London exhibition. It wasn’t easy; competition for the works with American and European gallerists was hot.
In the months following the news that White Cube would show his work, one of Park’s sought after, Twombly-esque Ecriture paintings from the 1970s smashed the artist’s auction record selling at Christie’s in Hong Kong for a multiple-estimate $1.2 million. For her January 2016 exhibition Kostyal pitched her prices lower than that, from $400,000 to $660,000, and sold the lot. The problem was not finding clients she said, but deciding which ones to sell to.
Art fairs have proved a popular venue for promoting this work, demonstrating how galleries take the lead in exploring new markets, ahead of the salerooms. In March at Art Basel Hong Kong, Korea’s Kukje Gallery showed works by Kwon Young-woo, one of the lesser known Dansaekhwa artists, and virtually sold out at prices from $26,000 to $275,000. The gallery will be showing more by this artist at next week’s Art Basel fair in Switzerland.
Coinciding with last year’s Frieze Masters, French dealer Olivier Malingue opened a new London gallery with a show for 82-year-old Cho Yong-ik. Although nothing by Cho had sold at auction for more than $90,000, these works from the 1970s on were priced from $100,000 to $180,000, and sold out.
Now the market has reached a new stage where the artist or their estates want exposure for new or most recent works, rather than rely on historic interest. Building on that historical interest, the galleries are marketing the later work.
At Mayfair’s Levy Gorvy Gallery, the pristine space is currently decked with seven similarly sized white paintings by Chung Sang-Hwa that are textured with geometric cracks and folds that look at first sight like craquelure on an old painting. But they are all recent works. Chung’s early works can sell for up to $1 million, but these are pitched at around $250,000.
At the Almine Rech Gallery nearby, prices for new work on smoke-charred canvases by Ha Chong-Hyun, whose prices reached $232,000 at auction in 2015 in Seoul, start at $180,000, compared to $1 million for a rare early work from the 1970s. This horizontal painting of barbed wire, which was painted on burlap, a rough but cheap canvas favoured by poor artists at the time, and laid over barbed wire, is punctured with holes made by the wire.
With the meteoric rise in value for these Korean artists that has taken place since 2014, the question now is whether this is a bubble that might burst. “Bubbles are associated with younger artists,” says Kostyal. “The historic nature of the Dansaekhwa artists puts them into another category.” “It’s not a speculative market” adds Jason Cori of Almine Rech, “…yet”.