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Past Exhibitions

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2016 International Art Exhibition
Lee Ungno and Calligraphic Abstraction in Europe

 

 


           2016.10.4.- 12.18. / Lee Ungno Museum

 

 

 

Abstract

 

<Lee Ungno and Calligraphic Abstraction in Europe> explores the calligraphic abstract style of Lee Ungno’s paintings within the context of Post-war Europe and modernist abstract painting. Previously in 2014, we brought together the works of Lee Ungno, Zao Wu-ki, Pierre Soulages, and Hans Hartung to examine the brushworks of their paintings, which were analogous to calligraphic strokes. In continuation of that, this exhibition links East Asian calligraphy and modernist abstract painting in the art of Lee Ungno, Georges Noël, and Henri Michaux. These three artists all exhibited at the Galerie Facchetti during the 1950s and the ‘60s and individually developed their calligraphic abstract styles by combining written characters with pictorial signs, or synchronizing the act of writing with the act of drawing.

 

English art critic Sir Herbert Read, in the preface to the second edition of <<Chinese Calligraphy>>(1938) by Chiang Yee, wrote that artists such as Michaux, Soulages, and Hartung were at least in part directly inspired by Chinese calligraphy, while discussing the analogy between the aesthetic of Chinese calligraphy and the aesthetic of Western abstract painting. The characteristic dancing lines of Georges Mathieu’s painting he set the art of lyrical abstraction in 1946 against geometric abstraction suggested calligraphic expressions, and perhaps were in communion with the calligraphic abstract forms of a number of Asian artists working in France from the 1940s to the ‘60s, including Imai Toshimitsu and Zao Wu-ki. East Asian calligraphy would be compared not only to the brushworks of European abstract painters but also to those of American expressionists such as Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning. However, Clement Greenberg did not think that Asian calligraphy inspired Abstract Expressionists painters; he rather commented on the resemblance between calligraphy and a certain mode of American expressionism, arguing any similarity was an effect of convergence at the most, and of accident at the least, in his essay ‘American-Type Painting.’

 

In Post-war Japan, avant-garde calligrapher Morita Shiryu’s Bokujin-kai (“Ink Human Society”) led an art movement that intended to break the barrier between calligraphy and abstract painting. Their unconventional style of calligraphy showed characters visually abstracted, time-based strokes/gestures, which were acclaimed in both the American and European art world during the 1950s. From a Western perspective, the possibilities of calligraphy as painting were also tested in the works of Mark Tobey and Morris Graves. In this atmosphere, the term ‘calligraphic art’ was used to refer to the synthesis between Eastern and Western art made during the 1950s and the ‘60s, since Michel Seuphor had used it to describe Japanese avant-garde calligraphy in his book <<Dictionary of Abstract Painting>> (1957). The art of Lee Ungno, Noël, and Michaux can be looked at in this context. 


Besides the visual similitude between the brush strokes of calligraphy and abstract painting, of writing and drawing, we can also analogize the aesthetic of calligraphy and the aesthetic of abstract painting, emphasizing the time-based ‘movements’ of the artists. The action inherent in an expressionist or Informel painting leads us to focus more on the situation of creation, the time-based performance of an artist, than the art itself. Through their peculiar gestural brushworks, Noël and Michaux filled their canvases with their unconsciousness and body movements, and defined a canvas as a stage for existential explorations. Similarly in calligraphy, characters are written in one breath with a calligrapher’s movement in the flow of time. This intersection between both art forms could be where the art of Lee Ungno, Noël, and Michaux arose in relation to mind, physical movements and time. 

 

Georges Noël blended pure pigments, sand, and glue in order to produce a highly sensitive surface, on which he left impulsive scratch marks, erasures, and written forms that expressed the flow of his consciousness and internal state. Synchronizing the act of drawing with the act of writing in this way, he created mysterious images that brought to mind ancient inscriptions or shamanistic signs, and as such his technique well shows the artist’s ambition to create new images. Henri Michaux explored the interior of an existence through gestures, alphabetic signs and the nature of Chinese ink. Learning the potential of calligraphy as an abstract art form in his trips to China and Japan, Michaux created expressive calligraphic abstractions that captured the artist’s internal upheavals using stains, signs and the fluidity of Chinese ink in an instant reaction to the movements of an artist’s brush. Lastly, Lee Ungno worked with traditional calligraphic brushstrokes to create a modern style of abstract painting. Holding fast to his identity as an ink painter, at the same time he employed various experimental art forms of modernist artists to develop his calligraphic abstract form, in which elements of Eastern and Western art freely combine. Lee Ungno found abstract images in Chinese characters that had been created in imitation of nature and objects and saw the characters as Eastern abstract forms. 

 


푸터


LEEUNGNO MUSEUM


#157, Dunsan-daero, Seo-gu, Daejeon, 35204, South Korea / Tel : 042) 611-9800 / Fax : 042) 611-9819

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