Nam Tchun-Mo Yungyang, South Korea, b. 1961

Nam Tchun-Mo was born in 1961 in Yeongyang, a remote farming county in inland South Korea, and lives and works between Daegu, South Korea, and Cologne, Germany. He holds an MFA from the School of Fine Art at Keimyung University in Daegu.

He is one of the most significant abstract painters of the generation that carries forward the Korean monochrome movement of the 1960s and '70s, Dansaekhwa, alongside Lee Ufan, Park Seo Bo and Ha Chong Hyun.

While maintaining the fundamentals of Dansaekhwa, such as repetition, restraint and material honesty, Nam pushes the practice toward sculpture and the process of construction. He builds his surfaces by pasting resin-hardened fabric into fine ridge-and-groove structures, arranging them into rhythmic lines across the canvas and working the surface with acrylic colour. The resulting relief captures and reflects light, so that light and shadow shift with the viewer's position and the work is never still.

Selected exhibitions includes: Return to Painting and Korean Dansaekpa (2012) at the National Contemporary Art Museum, Korea; Minimal Aesthetics (2011) at the Tong-in Auction Gallery, Seoul; a two-person show at IBU Gallery, Paris (2009); Gallery F5, Beijing (2008); Light & Mind (2006) at the Shin Museum of Art, Cheongju; Monochrom Paintings of Korea: Past and Present (2004) at the Seoul Museum of Art; and Extreme Beauty (2003) at the Sung Gok Museum of Art, Seoul. He has recently been awarded first prize by the Hachonghyn Foundation as a great master of the Dansaekhwa movement.