Tao's Pathway (Fire & Ice)2004
Encaustic (wax & oil) · 60 × 48 × 2 inShown installed
$35,000
Wellington Fine Art · Est. 1960 · Manhattan & Hamptons
Korean ArtRising
For the first time in twenty years, an exclusive retrospective of Yong Jo Ji's paintings has been assembled from private collections.
Works
34 paintings
Span
1996 — 2015
Media
Encaustic · Acrylic · Decoupage
Range
$2,750 — $35,000
Dansaekhwa & the second wave
A movement that made silence collectible
“Nothing is depicted. What remains is evidence of time, material and restraint.”
Mid 1970s
A monochrome answer to a loud decade
Under military rule and rapid industrialisation, a group of Korean painters turned away from imagery altogether. They pushed pigment through the back of the canvas, dragged graphite across drying paint, soaked raw hemp in ink until the cloth itself became the subject. Critics later grouped the work as Dansaekhwa — literally, monochrome painting.
The method
Repetition as discipline, not decoration
Dansaekhwa is closer to practice than to composition. The same gesture, performed for hours, until process and surface are indistinguishable. Nothing is depicted. What remains is evidence of time, material and restraint — an aesthetic with deep roots in Korean literati painting and Zen thought.
2015
Venice notices
A collateral exhibition at the Venice Biennale put the movement in front of the international market for the first time as a coherent school. Park Seo-Bo, Chung Sang-Hwa, Ha Chong-Hyun, Yun Hyong-keun and Lee Ufan moved from specialist interest to blue-chip status over the seasons that followed.
2021 – 2023
Two landmark US museum shows
American institutions began correcting the record, spotlighting the long-overlooked history of modern and avant-garde Korean art. Seoul, meanwhile, became a genuine art capital: a first-tier international fair, a serious gallery corridor, and a generation of collectors buying at home.
Now
The second wave is where the value sits
The founding Dansaekhwa names are largely priced for institutions. The opportunity has shifted to the artists who carried that sensibility abroad — painters working in the same language of surface, silence and repetition, still available at private-collection prices.
An artist for our times
Yong Jo Ji
Korean, b. 1969 · Sag Harbor, Long Island
Ji descends from a line of Korean warriors. His grandparents controlled much of Gangwon-do province, survived the occupation and the war, and then watched the land be taken and redistributed. His maternal grandmother, denied schooling because she was a girl, ran a Seoul grocery store after her husband died and put her daughter through Ewha Woman's University.
That inheritance — endurance, discipline, a refusal to be erased — is the pressure behind the surfaces. Ji works in acrylic and in encaustic, wax and oil built up and fused in layers until the painting holds light the way stone does. Zen Buddhism is the philosophical ground: the work is not depicting calm, it is the record of a practice that produces it.
He has shown in the Hamptons and at Gansevoort NYC, been covered by The New York Times, and has been placing paintings into private East End and Manhattan collections since 2010. Those are the collections this retrospective was assembled from.
- Born
- 1969, Korea — into a line of Korean warriors
- Family
- Grandparents held much of Gangwon-do province; the land was seized after the war. His mother was among the first 500 Korean women to take a university degree.
- Foundation
- Zen Buddhism — the philosophical ground under every acrylic and encaustic surface.
- Since 2010
- Hamptons collectors, Gansevoort NYC, coverage in The New York Times. The paintings now hang in East End and Manhattan residences.
Wax & oil · fused layer by layer
Strata
Encaustic is pigment carried in hot wax. Each layer has to set and fuse before the next is poured, so the finished surface is a record of its own making — which is the whole argument of the movement, in one material.
01Moonrocks Mandala199602Red Rocks Mandala199803Meeting 1200404Zen200505Illumination 12005
Tap to pour · tap again to open
The catalogue · thirty-four works
Every painting in the retrospective
Thirty-four paintings spanning 1996 to 2015, assembled from private collections. Encaustic, acrylic and decoupage, $2,750 to $35,000. Titles link through to each work's own page.
Not for sale · retained by the artist
Synchronicity2015
Acrylic on canvas · 48 × 48 in
The last painting in the survey, and the one the artist kept. Condition reports, provenance and viewing appointments are handled privately.
Wellington Fine Art · 121 East 70th Street, founded 1960
Buy the movement before it is priced like one
The founding Dansaekhwa painters now clear seven figures at auction. This retrospective is the same sensibility, one generation on, at a fraction of the entry point — and it will not be assembled in one place again.
- Viewing
- By appointment, Manhattan and the Hamptons. Works can be brought to you for approval.
- Placement
- Advisory, framing and installation — including lobby and corporate hangs — handled in house.
- Provenance
- Every work in this retrospective comes with condition notes and a documented private-collection history.