Time and space never remain frozen for a moment. They leave traces one way or another. The people of the Korean peninsula, who secured the terrain through ceaseless adversities for over five millennia, are surprisingly resilient in the face of such times.
In the year 1910, when Koreans lost their national sovereignty—to Japan—for the first time since the establishment of the Gojoseon kingdom (founded in 2,333 BCE), ironically, they were given the courage to finally raise their voices for themselves. During 35 years of Japanese occupation, Koreans shed their blood rather than succumb to the colonizer’s insults.
The pain of the division of North and South Korea following the Korean War, which we had to experience not long after the World War, rubbed salt into a wound that has yet to heal. The differences in views between the military regime and the proletarians pursuing “development” stifled the human rights and freedom of the nation.
Nevertheless, within a short period of time, the history of South Korea underwent significant changes, such as the hard-won democracy and the 1988 Olympics that put us on the international stage, followed by the IMF bailout request that burdened the people, who were buried in prosperity and had forgotten the past for a while.
There is no longer a land of the morning calm, but only the fierce people of the Republic of Korea, with their necks strained and their limbs swelling from their everyday struggles.
Amidst the rapidly changing flow of history, Korean art that emerged has shown distinct characteristics in each period, ranging from the 1950s Informel movement, when artists pursued learning from the authority of Western art history, to the avant-garde movement of the late 1960s that pursued innovative movements, and the establishment of Dansaekhwa (Korean monochrome paintings) influenced by Japanese art in the 1970s, as well as the Post-Dansaekhwa paintings of the late 1980s and 1990s.
The sudden rise of early Dansaekhwa paintings made during the 1970s and 1980s is rooted in a strong will to overcome the national trauma of Japanese occupation and the sociocultural remnants of colonization. Dansaekhwa was originally practiced to overthrow the 1950s trend of Informel prominent in the Korean art scene, where artists refused to conform to anything Japanese and hence chose to take after Euro-American culture.
The painstaking efforts to formulate a distinctly Korean style of art allowed monochrome paintings to thrive, but the irony of this lies in the fact that Dansaekhwa exudes the spirit of pre-contemporary Korean culture bound to the Chosun dynasty and the regimes before, not what we are at the very moment.
Lee Kun-Yong, born in 1942, projects his oeuvre with his entire physique amidst this chaos. Born and raised in Sariwon, Hwanghae Province (now part of North Korea) around the time when the peninsula was moving into a new epoch, he lost two of his siblings during the Korean War.
His father, a pioneering priest of a Protestant church, had a significant influence on young Lee’s cultivation of his interest in art and the humanities, the foundation of his art practice. With this persisting to this day, Lee is internationally acclaimed for his relentless contemplation and original creations.
Lee’s works shift the orthodox by thematicizing bodily restrictions, breaking the common conception that “Korean” art is characterized by its minimal composition, as seen in ink-wash paintings, porcelain, as well as modern artworks with such meditative qualities. His works reveal the present-day residents of Korea, ceaselessly progressing forward with burning flames at heart.
A Rational Take on the World
Lee Kun-Yong consolidated his art style during the 1970s. This was when Park Chung Hee and his junta stripped away democracy after the May 16 coup. From the late 1960s, by the time Lee graduated from college, avant-garde was crucial to Korean youths starting their art careers.
Fear of recolonization and rapid gentrification pushed people to build a national identity. To achieve this, the government chose to restrain the influx of Western culture and consumerism. Ironically, the authority’s five-year plans for economic development led to the accumulation of an unprecedented amount of wealth, allowing citizens easier access to foreign goods and elevating their personal tastes in living.
Avant-garde artists, who were stigmatized as those instigating decadence, raised their voices for cultural and ideological liberation. Those acts led to their being brutally tormented by the Agency for National Security Planning (NSP) and the police. Tear gas was fired on the streets every day to bring down the dictatorship.
Amid a series of rebellions by artists who did not know what to expect the next day, Lee proposed the idea of “Event-Logical.” It was a rational approach to calm down the art world blinded by emotions.
Yet to the military government that lacked reason, Lee’s logical deliberations were mere mockery of its authority. In 1975, the artist staged two performances under the titles Come Here and Can You See Me? at the 2nd Daegu Contemporary Art Festival and the 4th ’75 AG Group Exhibition.
The former is a performance in which one person calls to another, saying “come here,” and the person being called walks up to the caller while taking actions that might insult them. Similarly, the latter also involves one person calling to another and asking, “Can you see me?” while the person being called performs disrespectful actions toward that person.
For instance, the person being called faces backwards, bends the upper torso and looks at the caller through the space between the legs, makes a ring with their fingers and looks through the hole, or folds their arms and raises them close to the face, gazing at the person beyond the arms.
As a result, in December, Lee received an official document issued by the chief of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art stating that “Logical Event is a pseudo-avant-garde art, henceforth Lee Kun-Yong is no longer permitted to participate in museum exhibitions.”
Lee was not disheartened in any manner, but chose to gather young, like-minded artists to hold an “official document execution,” setting fire to the original paper. Even at times when he underwent severe torture by the public authorities, with officers stamping on both of his legs with lumber stuck to each, Lee demonstrated his daring character, choosing not to collapse into emotions and instead relying on his blasting wit and reason.
One of the features that defines Lee’s works is how the artist derives the theme and subject matter from the external world. While many of his contemporary artists tend to immerse themselves deep in their own minds, avoiding secular society, Lee enlightens the audience by translating the microscopic and macroscopic incidents around him into his avant-garde language, presenting them in forms including performance and paintings.
“The acts of approaching, engaging, experiencing, and participating hold more significance than creating an artwork. Hence, my works consist of and are characterized by elements of nature and the surrounding environment.”
— Excerpt from Lee Kun-Yong’s draft note, 1971
For instance, Corporal Term is made out of a willow trunk, uprooted by the government to construct the Gyeongbu Expressway connecting Seoul and Busan, carried straight to the exhibition venue in the form of a soil cube.
It was displayed in 1971 at the exhibition of the Korean Artists Association held at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, and two years later at the 8th Paris Biennale, using a tree donated by the French government from their national park.
For the latter event, Lee took a flight for the first time in his life, realizing how one’s body can be used as an art medium because he felt his body moving from one place to another while relying on an aircraft.
In particular, the Body Drawing series that adorned Lee’s solo exhibitions at Leeahn Gallery in Seoul and Daegu in 2017, 2019, and 2022 depicts bodily limitations on canvas when visual cues—the artist paints without looking at the screen—and autonomous movements are restricted.
This was inspired by his toddler daughter, who, while just learning to walk, stumbled while holding a crayon and drawing a line on the wall. The child’s struggle to draw the line conceived the idea for the series.
Unlike contemporary Korean art of his generation, which often takes a meditative approach that endlessly regresses inward, Lee’s artistry centers around engaging with the outside world by applying logic and theory based on his own experiences in order to communicate with external parties.
Theorization of the Body, Space, and Their Unity
After graduating from the Department of Western Painting at Hongik University’s College of Fine Arts in 1967, Lee Kun-Yong opened an art studio near Ewha Womans University in Daehyeon-dong.
Two years later, he founded the S.T. (Space and Time) Group, an art study group that would eventually play a significant role in establishing the foundation for his artistic career, with the current art critic Kim Bok-young.
During the time when Lee was exchanging information on contemporary art through the S.T. Group, a new voice began to rise up, calling for equality and pacifism not only in Europe but also in Latin America and Asia, starting with the May 1968 revolution in France.
As Anglo-American society, which had been steeped in excessive rationalism and Enlightenment ideas since the 18th-century Industrial Revolution, became gradually discontented with its long-standing dualistic thinking—which separated human and worldly attributes into reason and instinct, spirit and body, and subject and object—it came into great contrast with Asian ideologies emphasizing harmony in all creation.
Their reductionist ideology, which had dominated modern international political hegemony through massive colonial enterprise, inevitably permeated the colonized nations.
In 1945, the United States government dropped atomic bombs on Japan, liberating a number of colonized countries, including the Korean Peninsula. Following the Korean War, which erupted due to conflicts between capitalist countries such as the United States and socialist countries including the Soviet Union, the influence of Euro-American philosophy was a natural process in Korea, since the peninsula was greatly affected by the United States.
Among those philosophical ideologies from the West, Lee was particularly influenced by Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s The Flesh of the World theory and Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein.
He was also influenced by Lee Ufan’s Relatum theory from An Introduction to the Phenomenology of Encounter, as Lee Ufan studied in Tokyo, Japan, where Western cultural influx was the quickest across Asia.
Such philosophies have shaped Lee’s Body and Space theory, which asserts that one’s identity is formed through communicating with another. The world is a whole made up of countless particles, and the body is a subgroup of them. Where the particles are located, or which space they are occupying, is what defines their relationship with the world.
The relationship between body and space happens when they converge at a certain time and space, and such accumulation becomes the world we live in.
Living at the core of modern Korean history, through the Korean War, three series of democratic revolutions, and rapid industrialization, the artist has witnessed a variety of relational conflicts.
Within Korean art history, where the motivation behind creativity is primarily the act of self-introspection, Lee’s theory of Body and Space is appreciable since it provides a perspective from outside one’s body, the “site of ego/self.”
In the unstable times of the 1960s and 70s—when Lee’s artistry blossomed the most—when people and communities had no future prospects, each individual contributed to alleviating social chaos by not being immersed in oneself but by objectively communicating with other entities, whether individual to individual, individual to society, or in relation to military oppression, while also soothing the anxieties of modern individuals.
This approach is essential for South Korean society in the 21st century, which is undergoing some of the most rapid changes in human history.
Lee Kun-Yong’s Art Thriving on Water
To Lee, we exist as bodies and places, not only as subjects consisting of emotions and reasoning within the ecosystem. Relating such a philosophy to his oeuvre, he sheds light on contemporary social issues.
Furthermore, in the 21st century, he reflects on the hazards of modern civilization that depend heavily on technology and the relevant industry.
Lee’s artistic world, which unfolds around the body, the largest world for an individual, differs from the era when social control by human forces threatened personal freedom half a century ago.
Today, we face issues on a scale beyond the dominion of other human bodies, encompassing non-human forces such as nature and energy. This can also be found in the artist’s contemplative work diary on artistic forms, which was written in the year Corporal Term was presented, and is evident in his ongoing prolific production of the Bodyscape series that was displayed at the exhibition Reborn at Leeahn Gallery Seoul in 2022.
The artist’s deep and prolonged reflections on expressing a consistent message of solidarity with nature and moving forward are also revealed.
“The tendency of industrialization is to render all existence incapable of benefiting from anything other than the means of technologization and artificialization, inevitably fostering a mechanistic stagnation of all thought, perception, and knowledge.
In such a place, it is impossible to foster a comprehensive perception or consciousness of ecological interrelationships and existence, which instead leads to the destruction of the ecosystem. Therefore, today’s artists are required to revive the fundamental meaning of life that can escape from the mechanistic stagnation of perception, consciousness, and human thought brought about by industrialization. In other words, consciousness of de-industrialization is an important issue.”³
The key message that Lee conveys by utilizing natural materials as they are or working with the debris of discarded industry is that, through art, it is necessary to supply the life-giving water that has dried up due to the numerous contracts between artificial machines and human society.
Looking at the painting Art Parasitizing Water (2002), created as the artist welcomed the new millennium, it induces an illusion that the artist himself is integrated with his artwork, as he connects the upper half of his body from his representative early work Corporal Term with a cup of water.
This visual unity is as if Lee’s artwork injects water into the modern way of thinking that has become accustomed to a dualistic perspective of viewing the world through the visual fusion of nature and humans.
When the artist in the painting drinks water from a cup, the illusion of water penetrating the roots through the water vessel of a tree embedded in a cubic shape of earth is finally introduced into the viewer’s field of vision, filling it with contemplation.
As can be seen in several of his works such as Birth (1986, p. 94), Waterboarding (1986, p. 98), Water of Oblivion (1988, p. 102), Culture inside the Earthenware Pot (1989, p. 108), and IMF Restructuring (Skipping Stones) (1998, p. 134), the material of water holds a unique meaning for the artist.
Water is a “place” where life and death coexist, and a host that serves as a habitat for the “body.”
In the solo exhibition Reborn, held in collaboration with Leeahn Gallery Seoul in 2022, the artist also presents discourse on nature that circulates through water, such as the sea and Arctic glaciers.
These works mark a departure from the artist’s previous body of work, as they incorporate photographic images printed onto the canvas, with lines drawn on top.
Unlike the early works from the 1970s, which featured pen or pencil drawings on blank wood panels, the Bodyscape series has undergone various changes over time, with richer colors and a greater variety of tools used.
In the 1980s, the artist expanded the range of materials used, such as acrylic paints, and in the 1990s, introduced a series of works that shed light on various aspects of human society.
In the 21st century, he began to capture scenes of social significance through photography and print them onto canvas, adding figure drawings on top in order to directly convey messages to contemporary viewers.
Since the 2010s, Lee has gradually modified the way the body interacts with the canvas to expand the scope of his works. In particular, the works presented in Reborn use photographic images as a background that viewers can immediately comprehend, conveying the environmental crises he has long been concerned with.
For instance, Bodyscape series 76-3, also known as “Heart Drawing,” which has gained popularity recently, involves the artist standing with the screen beside him, drawing a half-circle with each arm to create a symmetrical shape.
In anticipation of the 2022 solo exhibition, Lee overlays a heart-shaped figure representing the range of his bodily motion onto a canvas featuring a photograph of a polar bear.
Imagining a familial situation where a mother bear tells her cub to look at the heart in the distance, the artist, who previously expressed himself through rigorous bodily and theoretical expressions, now tells a story filled with affectionate emotions.
Other works from the series depict various forms of water, such as a winter sea beneath the twilight sky or a mountain stream flowing thinly through a green mountain-scape.
In these paintings, the audience witnesses the moment when different lives on Earth, in the face of climate change, surviving or dying due to water, are reborn in the name of art as the 81-year-old Lee’s restricted movements encounter the natural world.
About the Book
This book, the second catalog published by Leeahn Gallery in collaboration with artist Lee Kun-Yong, examines the significance of Lee’s current state of not settling down, which reflects his deep interest in various contemporary social issues from the 1960s, when his art theory first took shape, to the 2020s, a time of global crises such as the pandemic and climate change.
Following Lee’s interests that have changed every decade, each chapter reveals the concepts or topics the artist focused on during that time period and discusses the works, production and performance processes, and how they intersect with modern Korean history.
The chronology of the artist’s contributions to the portrayal of everyday life in post-liberation Korea is juxtaposed with social events and accidents of the time, allowing readers to remember their roots as Korean people while also gaining insights that extend beyond their external world and thus better understand Lee’s art philosophy.
In Chapter 1, the focus is on the artistic perspective surrounding “Body and Space,” established through meticulous research and progressive experimentation since the 1970s.
The aim is to introduce the art of the body that blossomed in the dark political climate of South Korea, which became the world’s most destitute country after the Korean War and suffered under a long period of dictatorship, including works such as Body-71 (1971, p. 40), Corporal Term (1971, p. 46), and Bodyscape (1976, p. 54).
Chapter 2 examines socially critical works that focus on “Water” during the 1980s, as mentioned earlier.
Chapter 3 explores works created from the 1990s, which successfully challenged the dictatorship and underwent a transition to a new millennium, including works such as Human Term (1990, p. 116), Restructuring (1997–2003, p. 126), and For Women (2008, p. 140).
Various paintings, installations, and performances that discuss basic human rights, enabling people to live as human beings, allow us to glimpse a matured artistic perspective that has progressed in various directions, not only bound to domestic issues but to international ones as well.
Chapter 4 discusses works from the 2010s onward, including Lee’s All Directions: Newspaper Drawing (2013–2015, p. 146), Box Drawing (2017–2019, p. 154), and other works that have actively dealt with international incidents, not limited to domestic social phenomena.
The final chapter introduces Lee’s solo exhibition, Reborn, held in 2022 in collaboration with Leeahn Gallery, where paintings reflecting the artist’s passion for humanity and nature are presented.
It is our hope to guide modern audiences to encounter Lee as a performance artist who strives to comprehend the present, with his energy still overflowing despite his advanced age.
Notes
- Lee Kun-Yong, Project 1974, draft note from 1971, 1974, and 1979.
- Kim BokYoung, Lee Kun-Yong Logic – Finding Body and Space for 40 years, <2007 The sthlee [source information incomplete in original].
- Lee Kun-Yong, Ibid.
Originally written for Lee Kun-Yong’s publication at Leeahn Gallery, 2022.
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