Expositions passées
Lee Ungno was such an ardent proponent of new things that his friends nicknamed him “New Style.” Indeed, in a private exhibition in 1962 at Galerie Paul Facchetti, Lee featured artworks that were markedly different from the style he had pursued in Korea. At the time Lee moved to Paris, European art was no longer flowing into the Korean art community due to the chaos caused by Japan’s retreat after World War II and the outbreak of the Korean War. Korean artists’ ensuing ignorance of international art trends created a sense of crisis that was expressed, both directly and indirectly, in a yearning for Paris—the epicenter of contemporary art at the time—and, increasingly, a growing number of artists moving to France. Lee was no exception to this phenomenon. Once he arrived in his new home, he absorbed the techniques of abstract expression favored by the Art Informel school (the dominant school of the Parisian art scene), which allowed him to broaden his artistic world.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Lee concentrated on abstract creations. Until his final days, Lee tirelessly developed his abstract abilities through the use of various formats. After 1960, Lee began creating abstract paintings that looked like Chinese or Korean characters. In terms of material, his abstract artworks were predominantly collages made with traditional mulberry paper (hanji) in which hieroglyphic/pictogram-like images began to be featured on a neutral-toned surface. Lee seems to have used hanji, in a way that emphasizes the materiality of paper, after searching for a base material conducive to creating three-dimensional structures of the shapes he wished to form. He used relief, by stamping images onto layers of paper, to create seal-like artworks that expanded upon the West’s (largely) two-dimensional execution of the abstract. The fact that he chose to stamp hanji, which is both soft and sturdy, is indicative of Lee’s familiarity with a material he had used for decades. From the 1970s, Lee changed his “Letter Abstract” style completely, replacing the colorful, stele-like shapes of the 1960s with clearly-outlined ones in primary colors. He also experimented a great deal with materials in bold and creative ways, including thick cotton, lightweight synthetic fibers, glossy plastic, and shiny aluminum sheets. Lee coated these materials in paint and then cut them with scissors to create a completely new style of abstract art.
