Lee Seungjio: Advancing Columns

Lee Seungjio (1941–90) emerged with the avant–gardes in the 1960s, an era replete of aspirations for a new future, and steered the Korean geometrical abstraction forward. As an exhibition being held 30 years after his death, Lee Seungjio: Advancing Columns showcases 90 works that were born in his relation to the time he faced, and presents archives related to Origin and AG, both radical art groups that he participated in as a founding member.

After the 1960s and up to the 1990s, Lee Seungjio presented a formal language of cylindrical units that resembled “pipes,” and cultivated mechanical aesthetic paintings that are very rare to be seen in Korean abstract painting. From 1968 to 1971, he received awards four years in a row at the National Art Exhibitions, known for their conversative taste, and stirred up new waves where abstract paintings were seldom awarded. Even as he conceptually associated his work with external trends of contemporary art such as phenomenology, conceptual art and minimalism as well as Dansaekhwa after the mid–1970s, he never let go of the uniqueness of Nucleus that he pioneered himself.

As a metaphor of construction and progress, Advancing Columns suggests a new contextual reading of Lee Seungjio as a pioneer. The title of the exhibition is an homage to Lee Seungjio’s interview in which he mentioned a railway journey in 1982, and seeks to reveal the basis of time and space in his works that were relatively understated compared to their visuality. In the 1960s and 1970s of rapid industrialization and urbanization, Lee Seungjio witnesses, as a corporeality, the opening of expressways, the building of steel mills and apartments, and the launching of spaceships into the outer space. His mentioning of the moment when the passing landscapes outside the window are retroactive to light with speed—it is the sensitization of speed oriented toward future. The artist not only re­jected his stance on the changes in artistic environment as visible representations, but also translated them into a microscopic and vast concept. Nucleus, as the focal work of his lifetime, guides viewers to the literal avant–garde, or the front line of painting, the vast space of the mind as the ultimate destination.