Graffiti News

French artist Boyane Zelechowski has opened a solo exhibition called "Neo Joseon" at Hippie Hannam Gallery in central Seoul. According to The Korea Times, the show runs through September 19, 2026, forms part of Seoul Art Week 2026, and is free to enter. An opening reception is scheduled for September 1 from 5 to 7 p.m.

The work layers three things that rarely appear on the same surface: European graffiti, comic-book illustration, and traditional Korean painting. The Korea Times reports that half the pieces are painted on hanji, the traditional handmade Korean mulberry paper, with calligraphy brushes used for the line work. Zelechowski calls the resulting style "Retro-Futurism."

From spray cans to mulberry paper

Boyane Zelechowski was active in the European graffiti scene in the early 2000s while studying at the École des Beaux-Arts de Saint-Étienne. He relocated to Seoul in 2011 and now works as a muralist, silkscreen printer and fine artist. That trajectory — street first, formal art education alongside it, gallery walls later — is a common one among the generation that followed European graffiti's founders.

The material choice is the surprising part. Graffiti assumes cans, rollers, fast-drying paint and a wall large enough to be read from across a street. A brush line on hanji assumes the opposite: a small surface, absorbent fibre, and a mark that cannot be painted over cleanly. What the two share is that neither allows a second attempt. A wrong stroke on a wall means repainting the panel; a wrong stroke on hanji means starting the sheet again.

What the artist changed about dancheong's colour

Zelechowski did not transplant dancheong's palette unaltered. Speaking to The Korea Times, he said: "The colors of dancheong are based on 'obangsaek,' the traditional five-color system. I changed the tones and used transparencies to make viewers feel like they are seeing a reference or memory."

Dancheong is the vivid decorative colouring historically applied to Korean temples, palaces and other wooden buildings. It is built on obangsaek, a five-colour system of blue, red, yellow, white and black in which each colour carries a directional and symbolic meaning rather than a merely decorative one.

Shifting the tones and introducing transparency is therefore not a stylistic flourish. Saturation and opacity are close to structural rules in dancheong — the colours are meant to be flat, full-strength and legible from a distance. Softening them signals that the tradition is being quoted rather than continued, and that the quotation is not being disguised.

Where dancheong and graffiti actually overlap

The two traditions come from unrelated places, but they solve some of the same formal problems. Dancheong fills flat fields of saturated colour, separates them with hard outlines, and repeats a fixed vocabulary of motifs across large expanses of timber. Graffiti lettering builds an outline first, fills it with flat colour, and repeats a set of shape rules across a wall. Both are applied to architecture rather than canvas, and both are designed to be read at distance rather than examined at arm's length.

That structural overlap is a more useful description of the work than "East meets West," because it points at the specific joint where the two systems can be welded together.

What to look at in Seoul after the show

Dancheong is easy to check against the real thing in Seoul. It survives in original form on the eaves and bracket sets of Gyeongbokgung and Changdeokgung, and on temple buildings across the city. Seeing altered tones in a gallery and then standing under a palace eave makes the artist's edits considerably more visible.

Murals and street art around Hannam-dong, Itaewon and the rest of the city are mapped on the Wallscape map. Gallery, wall and palace fit comfortably into a single day.

Source: The Korea Times