Lee Ungno (李應魯, 12 January 1904 (lunar calendar)1 – 10 January 1989), also spelled Lee Ungno, was a French painter born in South Korea. His family seat was Jeonui (全義), and his art names were Gowon (顧庵, 顧菴) and Jeoksa (竹士, 竹史).
Life
Birth and upbringing
Lee Ungno was born in Hongcheon-myeon, Hongju County, South Chungcheong Province (present-day Junggye-ri, Hongbuk-myeon, Hongseong County), the fourth son among five sons and one daughter of his father, Lee Geun-sang, and his mother, Lady Kim of the Gimhae Kim clan. He spent his early childhood briefly in Gowon-ri, Hongseong-eup, Hongseong County, and later in Yesan-ri, Yesan-eup, Yesan County, South Chungcheong Province. He then grew up in Naksang-ri, Deoksan-myeon, Yesan County.2 At the age of seventeen, he ran away from home to become a painter. He worked as a lacquer painter on coffin houses and painted decorative patterns on the shrine at Sanjedang, and he learned the basics of ink painting from Yeomjae Song Tae-hoe. In 1923, in Gyeongseong Prefecture, he became a disciple of Haegang Kim Gyu-jin, then a famous calligrapher and painter of calligraphy and painting, where he studied calligraphy, Four Gentlemen painting, and ink painting, and received the art name Jeoksa. In 1924 he submitted "Bamboo in Ink" to the Joseon Art Exhibition and was selected. In 1928 he was active in Gongju and Daejeon before settling in Jungang-dong, Jeonju, where he ran a signboard shop called Gaecheoksa. In 1931, at the 10th Joseon Art Exhibition's calligraphy-and-painting division for Four Gentlemen, he won a special selection for blue bamboo. The following year he submitted Bamboo in Wind, Large Bamboo, and Blue Bamboo to the same exhibition without jury review. In 1933 he received the art name Gowon from Gyuyeong Jeong Byeong-jo.
In Japan
In 1935 he moved to Japan with his family and ran a newspaper distribution office in Tokyo while continuing his artistic work. He studied at the Kawabata Art School in Tokyo. He also studied Western painting techniques at the Honghyang Painting Research Institute in Tokyo, and he studied at the studio of Matsubayashi Keigetsu, a master of Japanese Nanga painting. These schools were not regular art schools but preparatory schools for entry into the main courses, and there he trained in Western drawing and oil painting techniques. Matsubayashi once instructed him to go to a bamboo grove and carefully observe its ecology, because his brushwork was too unrestrained and he had disregarded or neglected normative standards. However, he had not received formal art training at a regular school, and this did not mean he was lazy or lacked talent.3 In 1935 he was selected at the 95th Japan Art Association Exhibition with Bamboo in Wind. In 1938, at the 17th Senten, he won the Imperial Household Agency Prize, and until 1945 he continued to submit works to the Senten and the Japan Teien Exhibition, receiving selections, special selections, or non-juried entries. In 1939 he held his first solo exhibition at the Hwashin Gallery in Seoul, where the works were new Nanga paintings. His works moved away from traditional Four Gentlemen painting and were mainly realist landscape studies of real subjects.
Return to Korea
In 1945, at the age of forty-two, Lee Ungno returned to Korea upon liberation. He took over the Sudeok Inn in Yesan, South Chungcheong Province, entrusted its management to his younger brother Heung-no, and opened the "Gowon Painting Studio" in Seoul. In 1946, together with Kim Yeong-gi, Bae Ryeom, Lee Yu-tae, and Jang Woo-sung, he founded the Dangu Art Institute (檀丘美術院), which advocated the elimination of Japanese colonial remnants and a national Korean painting. He also became a standing committee member of the Joseon Art Association.
In 1948 he took up a post at the Hongik University predecessor, Hongik College (present-day Hongik University), and remained there until June 1950. From 1948 to 1954 he held solo exhibitions at the Daejeon Cultural Center, Donga Gallery, the Hwashin Department Store in Seoul, and in Gwangju, Hongseong, Suwon, and Yesan. In 1954 he became a professor of the Department of Eastern Painting at Seorabeol College of Arts in Gyeongju. In 1956 he published Appreciation and Techniques of Eastern Painting.
In 1954 he criticized the abuses of the Korean National Art Exhibition and refused an invitation to become a recommended artist for it. His works "Emergence" and "Mountain" were exhibited at the Contemporary Korean Art Exhibition held at the World House Gallery in New York, and the Rockefeller Foundation purchased them and donated them to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He received an invitation from Jacques Lassaigne, head of the French branch of the International Association of Art Critics, to work as an artist in France. He was the only Eastern painter invited to the contemporary artists' exhibition sponsored by the Chosun Ilbo, where he exhibited "Forest," "Mountain," and "Silver Bird."
In France
In December 1958 he left Korea and moved his stage of artistic work to France. Before leaving, he held a solo exhibition commemorating his departure for France at the Central Public Information Office in Seoul. In 1959, through the arrangement of West German ambassador Dr. Richard Hertz, he visited West Germany and stayed for one year in Cologne, Bonn, and Frankfurt. During this period he held a joint exhibition with his wife Park In-kyung at the Municipal Museum of Bonn and held solo exhibitions in Frankfurt and Cologne. In January 1960 he settled in Paris, where he exhibited at the Exhibition of Korean Artists in France, held a solo exhibition at the International Contemporary Gallery in Washington, D.C., United States, and took part in a group exhibition at the Paul Facchetti Gallery in Paris.
Lee Ungno's life after starting anew in Paris was so destitute that he had no materials with which to make works. He picked up discarded old color magazines from the yard and tore them and pasted them onto canvas in place of paint, and this developed into a new turning point. It was his discovery of the collage technique. It was not simply tearing and pasting, but the "strokes" felt when writing with a brush were conferred on the work through this process. Each piece of paper that was pasted, like the strokes of calligraphy, layered and accumulated the force and rhythm of each stroke, and the work was made in this way. His collage work No. 60 was exhibited at the Carnegie International Exhibition, which opened in November 1961. In November 1962 he held the invitational exhibition "Lee Ungno, Collage" at the Paul Facchetti Gallery in Paris and signed an exclusive contract with that gallery. He also held a first solo invitational exhibition at the Central Public Information Office in Seoul and participated in the Salon Comparaisons in Paris. On the recommendation of three critics, J. Lassaigne, M. Ragon, and P. Schneider, he held an exhibition at the Max Kaganovitch Gallery in Paris and a solo exhibition in Munich, Germany.
On reaching his sixtieth year, Lee Ungno in early November 1964 founded the Paris Oriental Art School inside the Cernuschi Museum in Paris with the support of artists and various figures of the French art world. He exhibited an invited work at the Carnegie International Art Exhibition in Pittsburgh, United States, and held solo exhibitions at the Numaga Gallery in Ober-Nigg, Switzerland, and the Max Kaganovitch Gallery in Paris. The following year he received the Silver Prize at the 8th São Paulo Biennial in Brazil. Afterward he held solo exhibitions at the Copenhagen National Museum in Denmark and at the Numaga Gallery in Switzerland.
Return to France after imprisonment
In 1967 the East Berlin Spy Incident was fabricated by agents of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency. He went to East Berlin in East Germany to meet a son from whom he had been separated during the Korean War, but he was abducted to South Korea and imprisoned.4 Shin Young-bok had expected that if his own trial ended quickly and he was transferred to Daejeon Prison, he would be able to meet Lee Ungno, but Lee was released quickly thanks to appeals from the French government, so they did not meet. After his release in March 1969 he recuperated at the Sudeok Inn in Yesan and then returned to France. Because of this affair he was cut off from the South Korean art world, but he continued his steady activity, exhibiting in dozens of invitational exhibitions centered on Switzerland and France, followed by Japan, the United States, and Belgium. At the Oriental Art School in Paris, he again taught ink painting techniques to French students.
In 1975 he held a solo exhibition at the Hyundai Gallery and exhibited in a painting and collage exhibition at the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery in England. In November 1976 he opened the Koryo Gallery in Paris, and in France a film about his life titled Ungno Lee was produced. In the same year he produced a mural for the Joinville High School.
In 1977 he held a solo exhibition at the Munhon Gallery with the new work Dance Painting (〈무화 舞畵〉). His wife Park In-kyung was reported to be implicated in the attempted kidnapping of the married couple Baek Geon-woo and Yoon Jung-hee, carried out by North Korea in Zurich on 31 July 1977. Afterward Lee Ungno's relations with his homeland were severed over ideological issues, and he naturalized as a French citizen.
In 1985 he held his last solo exhibition in Tokyo, Japan, and in 1989 he died of a heart attack in Paris, France.
Artistic world
The "Human" series
The "Group Portrait" (群像) series, one of his representative works, belongs to his late period. He painted the "Group" series intensively from the late 1970s. Lee Ji-ho, director of the Lee Ungno Museum, analyzed: "In his early 'Group' works, the decorative styles seen in his later character abstractions are expressed transformed into human figures, and the entire surface is evenly filled with organic shapes reminiscent of human forms, whose forms are designed and decorative. But in the later period, Ungno's 'groups' became smaller and simpler in their images and appeared repetitively. It can be said that he restrained expression on the surface. Gradually, human figures began to cover the entire surface, and the people filling the canvas appear to dance and look merry, as if coming out of a huge festival."5
Ungno said: "My painting was abstract in expression, but from the Gwangju Revolution of May 1980 onward, I brought into the painting more concrete elements that appeal to people. I painted the movements of thousands of crowds on a canvas of two hundred ho. Koreans, seeing this painting, immediately associated it with Gwangju or with student demonstrations in Seoul. Europeans saw it as an anti-nuclear movement, but both understood my feelings well."6
Works similar in format to Ungno's "Group" series had been attempted in the early 1960s, and in the late 1970s human groups briefly appeared combined with written characters. The "Human" series, produced in earnest in the 1980s, initially did not feature many figures, with only two or five. At most there were about twenty. From around 1985, large crowds began to appear.7 It is significant for the revolutionary change in Lee Ungno's artistic power that an artist with an Eastern philosophical background made the human being as his main subject, and not merely depicted the inner reality of one or two people, but painted images of countless groups and human masses. His interest did not remain in a world of simple ideas, contemplative nature, or aesthetic solitude and isolation, but approached living humans, moving humans, and humans within history.8
His nephew Lee Kang-se recalled that Ungno said: "Our homeland must certainly be unified. When the day comes that our homeland is unified like this painting, our fellow Korean people will dance with joy, and when I do this work I feel both duty and joy together." He called the human or crowd series "Dance of Unification" (통일무).9
The periods of the artist's own division
He himself divided his artistic life into six periods. In his twenties, his work was mainly imitation based on traditional Korean Eastern painting and calligraphic techniques; in his thirties he studied natural objects in a realist manner; in his forties he expressed semi-abstract forms, that is, an intentional (思意的) expression of natural reality; in his fifties he began abstraction in Europe, a period of intentional abstraction; and in his sixties he worked in a period of calligraphic abstraction.10
Legacy
In 1992 a "Gowon Seobang" commemorating him was established in Vaux-sur-Seine, France, and in 2000 the Lee Ungno Museum opened in Pyeongchang-dong, Seoul. In 2005 the Lee Ungno Museum in Seoul closed, and Daejeon took over its collection. In 2007 the Lee Ungno Museum opened in Dunsan Grand Park, Manyeon-dong, Seo District, Daejeon. The Daejeon Lee Ungno Museum was designed by the French architect Laurent Beaudouin, and it conducts various research and exhibitions in connection with the Gowon Academy in Paris. In 2012 the Daejeon Gowon Art and Culture Foundation was established.11
Family
In 1936 he married Park Gwi-hui (朴貴嬉, 1909 – 2001) and lived together, running an inn near Sudeok Temple in Yesan. However, in 1958 Lee Ungno left for Paris with Park In-kyung, a painter who was his junior, and they separated; afterward they legally divorced.1213
Publications and films
- Lee Ungno, Appreciation and Techniques of Eastern Painting (동양화의 감상과 기법), Munhwa Gyoyuk Publishing (Seoul), 1956
- Lee Ungno and Pierre Jakyar, Seo (書), Idée et Calligraphie (Neuchâtel, Switzerland), 1973
- Lee Ungno, Sumukbeopchaehwabeop (水墨法 采畵法), Koryo Gallery (Paris, France), 1978
- Lee Ungno, Park In-kyung, and Domiyama Taeko, Seoul · Paris · Tokyo (서울 · 파리 · 동경), Kirokusha (Tokyo, Japan), 1985
- Lee Ungno, Mukgi (墨技), Atelier de la Bonne Aventure (Versailles, France), 1988
- 'Ungno Lee', Annick Le Mouine Gallery (Paris, France), 1976
Related cultural heritage
Footnotes