‘Old Newness’

A few days ago I gave a talk at an International Conference on World Heritage held in Korea. The title of the conference was ‘World Heritage. Old Newness.’ The two-day conference included a video address from Stephan Doempke, the Chair of World Heritage Watch in which, amongst other things, he discussed the damage of cultural sites in Ukraine: UNESCO has verified damage to 168 sites since 24 February.

My talk was in the section of the conference dedicated to ‘Artistic Interpretation of World Heritage and Creation of Future Heritage’. It was entitled ‘Cultural Heritage as ‘Memory Event. The Case of Dansaekhwa’, and I am posting the first part of the talk today in a slightly different version. Here, I discuss the Korean art tendency known as ‘Dansaekhwa’ (One-colour-painting), which emerged in the Republic of Korea in the 1970s - I have written about Dansaekhwa on more than one occasion in this blog, and also published several essays, and there’s a chapter on Dansaekhwa in my book ‘The Simple Truth. The Monochrome in Modern Art’ (2020). I discuss how the artists’ works can be seen to transform the rigid experience of Past and Present into a more personal and inward experience of Then and Now.