How Lee Ung-no pioneered East-West fusion through brushstrokes

Retrospective presents master’s never-before-seen works in Korea

DAEJEON — Lee Ung-no (19041989) was a pioneering artist who seamlessly fused East and West, a distinction that may now sound cliché but defines his legacy.

Most of Lee’s representative works, produced after his move to France in 1958, embraced both the calligraphic heritage of Korea and the evolving Western abstraction — from collages featuring discarded “hanji” (traditional Korean paper made from the bark of mulberry trees) and newspapers to the “Abstract Letter” series that utilized ancient Chinese characters as purely geometric patterns on canvas.

And in his tour de force, “Gunsang” (People) series, countless human figures rendered in dynamic ink brushstrokes take on abstract pictographic forms.

“Only when we consider the Eastern spiritual heritage that Lee grew up with, alongside the modern Western artistic trends that inspired him in Europe, can we understand his oeuvre in a more comprehensive manner,” noted Kim Ji-yoon, curator of the Lee Ungno Museum in Daejeon.

The museum, located a two-hour drive from Seoul, is commemorating the 120th anniversary of the artist’s birth with a new exhibition designed to present such a balanced look at the Korean modern master.

Entitled “Winds from the East, Winds from the West,” the retrospective, co-organized by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA), is particularly noteworthy in that nearly 40 works out of the 60 on view are being showcased in Korea for the first time. These include pieces from the collections

of the Centre Pompidou and the Musée Cernuschi in Paris.

With such a lineup, the show offers an important glimpse into the reevaluated legacy of the artist, whose works were once banned from public display in Korea for decades after he was embroiled in a political scandal that led to his imprisonment during a time of ideological polarization.

Born in 1904 in Hongseong, South Chungcheong Province, Lee started his creative journey in calligraphy and literati painting, breathing

life into “sagunja,” or the Four Gracious Plants — plum, orchid, chrysanthemum and bamboo — on paper. His bamboo paintings gained recognition in juried national art expositions held during the 1910-45 Japanese colonial rule.

It wasn’t until 1935, when he traveled to Tokyo and was exposed to 20th-century Western art, that he began to explore beyond the confines of the classical subject matter and vocabulary of literati painting. But that didn’t mean he abandoned the traditional techniques of East

Asian brushwork.

In 1958, at the age of 54, he embarked on a journey to Europe upon the invitation of French art historian and critic Jacques Lassaigne.

It was here he started experimenting with the European Art Informel style — but with Eastern calligraphic injections.

At his inaugural solo show mounted at the Paris-based Galerie Paul Facchetti in 1962, a prominent avant-garde gallery that featured the works of Jackson Pollock in the French capital for the first time, Lee presented a series of paper collages comprising crumpled pages of hanji, magazines and newspapers pasted onto the canvas.

While a typical Western collage would arrange the cut-out ephemera flat on the surface, Lee focused on creating a rugged, semi-3D texture by reassembling the wrinkled paper fragments, ink stains and brushstrokes all in one composition.

Several years later, the East-West fusion materialized in the artist’s works in an even more innovative form — “Abstract Letter” series. The artist consistently emphasized the inherent connection between calligraphy and abstract painting during his lifetime, curator Kim explained.

In these pieces, Chinese characters and Hangeul (Korean alphabets), among other ancient scripts, were deconstructed into purely aesthetic, geometric building blocks without retaining any association with their original meaning.

On view at the museum are “Composition” (late 1970s), a brightly-colored, abstract family portrait whose shape is inspired by the Chinese character for “good” (好), and “Calligraphy - 産” (1959),” which depicts an individual on a cliffside using the Chinese alphabet for “to produce.”

However, his creative odyssey was forcibly put on hold in 1967 by the authoritarian government of Park Chung-hee when his perceived association with leftist intellectual circles and his time spent in Paris led to suspicions about his political affiliations.

Amid the scandal fueled by anti-communist sentiments in the country — dubbed the “East Berlin Case” — Lee, along with nearly 200 other creatives and students, was arrested on charges of spying for North Korea and was subsequently imprisoned for two and a half years.

Even behind bars, the artist never ceased to create art, producing more than 300 pieces using whatever materials that he could get his hands on - toilet paper, soy sauce and rice paste.

Upon his release, Lee returned to France and spent the rest of his life in exile. It was during this period that one of his greatest masterpieces, “Gunsang” series, came to life.

Crowds of inky, nameless humans populate the entire canvas, with arms stretched toward the sky, torsos bent back, jumping and running around.

Painted in response to the 1980 pro-democracy Gwangju Uprising, which deeply affected him as another victim of political persecution, his figures seem to perpetually exist in an ambiguous state of angst, fury or joy.

The exhibition also highlights Lee’s role as an educator who founded the first educational program on Eastern painting in Europe: L’Académie de Peinture Orientale de Paris.

What began as informal mini-lessons on East Asian painting and calligraphy in the artist’s studio in 1962 turned into an art school that has produced over 3,000 graduates of diverse nationalities to this day.

His commitment as an educator was guided by the same philosophy that governed his lifelong oeuvre “to foster active communication and exchange between the East and the West as a bridge, rather than merely propagating Eastern aesthetics,” curator Kim noted.

“Winds from the East, Winds from the West” runs through March 3, 2024 at the Lee Ungno Museum.