[1] The group was founded by painter-professor Suh Se-ok (1929–2020) at The Department of Oriental Painting at Seoul National University and lasted from March 1960 to June 1964.
[3] The main aim was to create a genre of ink painting that transcended cultural binaries and allowed for the complete freedom of expression.
This was due to the establishment of a loose set of standards for membership: must be under the age of 35, have a strong desire to create and innovate, have a grasp of Western and Eastern painting techniques.
[8] Members’ works consisted mainly of landscapes and figurative scenes that pulled from their respective traditional ink painting training rather than any sort of abstraction.
[citation needed] Each of these artists' approaches to abstraction was idiosyncratic and teetered on a spectrum between Western modernism and the traditions of ink painting.
There were also artists who never interacted with the group as members who became established abstract ink painters in their own right such as Kwon Young-woo and Ahn Sang-Cheol.
Mukrimhoe was a collective attempt at breaking free from the traditions of figurative ink painting in response to the confluence of foreign and national influences and agendas.
[11] At the third group exhibition (February 1961) Seo showed Chaimu, an abstract rendition of a peacock whose feathers were represented through a dabbling effect of ink that formed a halo around a simplified body figure.
1933) was also a writer and the group's successor after Suh Se-ok. His work was considered by member Jeong Tak-young to be the most innovative since the first exhibition due to his use of chance processes such as dunking paper into mixtures of ink.
[14] Untitled, now owned by National Museom of Modern and Contemporary Arts, made in 1950s and showed structural and compositional abstraction that delineated the subject and background into color fields.
[15] In 1963, his piece Untitled utilized a woven grass matt as a canvas and broke the formal tradition of oriental painting formats.
For example, his Two Travelers piece shown in the 5th group exhibition featured two semi-abstract, semi-figurative forms that highlighted the expressiveness of ink as a spiritual medium.
Artists like Park Seo-bo, Kim Ki-chang, and Suh Se-ok argued that abstract ink painting should be included as a contemporary global art.
On the other hand, people like Lee Yeol-mo asserted that since abstraction originated in the West, Korea should be represented by its own “unique” ethno-national art form.
Also, Suh Se-ok's painting Unhan, which focused on the theme of the cosmos and spirituality, won the newly established President's Award.
Their idea was a generalization that didn't take into account abstract ink artists who were pursuing a lost “Korean identity” or cultural origin.
[24] Informel overlapped with abstract oriental painter's rejection of modern civilzaion and returning to a sort of primitive purity.
Both Western and Oriental (ink) abstract painters seem to long for an unsullied bygone historical referent as seen in their pieces’ names like “Stone Age” and “Zone of Zero” particularly after the 5/16 coup.
He was trying to create, “a new methodology of Oriental painting that meets the contemporary aesthetic consciousness.”[citation needed] Main Members: Dong-sook Ahn, Shin Young-sang, Yang Jeong-ja, Lee Seok-woo, Yong-jae, Keum Dong-won, Yoo Nam-sik, Kim Won 마승재.