I was traveling on a train. I was lost in thought, with my eyes closed, and there was something that flashed across my retina. I suddenly opened my eyes. But there was nothing. It was like the inability to forget a person who made a strong first impression. As soon as I arrived home, I worked straight through two nights with what was left of the image in my mind, completing today's pipe-like painting. – Lee Seung Jio
Kukje Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of work by Lee Seung Jio (1941–1990) from 1 September to 30 October 2022. The artist's first exhibition with the gallery, the presentation of thirty works will examine anew the unique visual language of a painter who devoted his practice to developing a vocabulary of geometric abstraction in Korea.
Born in 1941 in Yongcheon, Pyeonganbuk Province, Lee Seung Jio moved to the south with his family in the post-liberation period. After joining art clubs in middle and high schools, he devoted himself to painting while a student at Hongik University, joining the Department of Western Painting in 1960. In 1962, he founded the Origin Group with his fellow artists including Kwon Young-Woo and Suh Seung-Won. As the name indicates, the avant-garde group sought a reduction to the foundational elements of art, as it fought against the conventional aesthetic systems of the time. Cultivating a visual language of his own, in 1967 Lee presented the first work in his 'Nucleus' series, a title chosen by the artist for its association with an irreducible core element.
Only months later, in 1968 Lee painted his first 'pipe' form in the tenth painting of the 'Nucleus' series. A subject that would become his most familiar archetypal motif, the artist used masking tape to define the borders on the canvas, then applying oil paint with a flat brush. By putting light-coloured paint at the centre of the brush and darker hues on both ends, he was able to paint each colour band with one stroke. By repeating this technique, he erased the distinction between disparate colours in the brushstrokes, forming a natural gradient that also captured an uncanny three-dimensionality. After laying in the colours of the bands, the artist would also sand the surface of the painting, burnishing the medium to further allude to a metallic surface.
Garnering an optical illusion through simple shapes and colour variations within a rigid order, Lee's forms soon became the core of his vocabulary. In the year that followed his breakthrough, Lee won the Grand Prize at the first Dong-A International Fine Art Exhibition and the Minister of Culture and Information Prize at the National Art Exhibition (Gukjeon), making history as the first abstract artist to be awarded the highest honour in the western painting category. His work received awards at the National Art Exhibition for four consecutive years through 1971, provoking his famous observation, 'it is hard to win a prize, but harder to not win one.'
While acknowledging the importance of his signature method, Lee observed that, 'There are people who call me "the pipe painter." It is not a label I welcome nor dislike. The name is simply a reference to the illusory objecthood deriving from a repetitive act of seeing, where the premise of figurative object as a motif is denied. Of course, its appearance was never meant to indicate any symbolic body for contemporary civilisation.'
As the artist himself notes, the pipe-like forms are neither an association to nor an extension of any specific object. Asserting that these forms should only be read as a combination of line and colour, the primary elements of painting, the art critic Lee Yil had suggested that, 'through the order of regular repetition as a basic principle of plasticity, Lee Seung Jio introduced Clement Greenberg's "self-reductive abstraction" or "post-painterly abstraction" for the first time in Korea.'
In contrast, the machine critic Youngjun Lee later argued that if we are to recognise abstract art as 'a reaction to the new sensibility of a rapidly industrialising and modernising world,' then it is natural to read art as in association with how the changes of perception, driven by our new machine civilisation, are expressed on the canvas. The landscape perceived walking on two legs cannot be the same as that perceived looking out the window from a seat of a train traveling over 100km per hour. As can be seen from the artist's notes recollecting his own train journey, technology leads the one experiencing it to mull over the unfamiliar sensation. Machine aesthetics cannot but be seen in relation to the development of modern and contemporary art.
Lee Seung Jio had remarked that it was after the launch of NASA's Apollo space craft that he opened his eyes to a new consciousness of space in relation to the cosmos and embraced his work as the most appropriate form of expressing the times he lived in. Lee's estate has described the artist, 'a man who did not know math and yet so clearly saw through speed and expansiveness.' Interpreting the advancement of a generation as the result of the velocity secured through new science and technology, philosopher Paul Virilio has argued that speed is the medium of our collective experience and the core impetus behind the historic dynamics of that experience. He defines speed as 'the world's destiny and its destination.' This is an appropriate framing of Lee Seung Jio's work, where the artist clearly embraced this destiny, adapting the motifs and terms of technology to his canvas. As his practice evolved, the artist would produce large-scale works longer than 4 meters wide, in a bid to capture the infinitely expanding universe onto the canvas.
Press release courtesy Kukje Gallery.
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