Through All Your Senses: A multisensory interaction with the art of Lee Ungno, Lee Ungno Museum exhibition

Lee Ungno’s work traverses a wide range of techniques and genres, from painting, sculpting, and drawing to collage, tapestry, and engraving, from traditional ink painting to modern abstraction. Although the foundation of his artistic practice had deep roots in the Eastern artistic tradition, Lee was more concerned with modernizing his work’s style and theme than with holding on to traditional aesthetics. He was an artist ever in search of the new.
In the way that Lee appropriated calligraphic elements of Eastern painting and clearing a new path into modern art, we can find its resemblance with media art methodologies that push the boundaries of contemporary art practice. Lee was a bold experimenter who attempted things that had not been attempted before, and as he explored the languages of Western realism and abstract art, his painting style transitioned from the semi-abstract to the non-figurative. This progression was a result of his ambition to create art that reflected the zeitgeist.
Media art is the field in which the most experimental and challenging artistic attempts through the use of media technologies are taking place. They are attempts to create new portraitures of the world we live in. This ultimate aim of media art—to develop new art forms for a new time through unceasing experimentation—was also a major artistic concern for Lee.
Lee worked to invent new artistic modalities for his generation, to update the conventions of his art, throughout his life. The challenging spirit that pushed him to pursue new forms, to never be satisfied with the present, is also to be found in the philosophical energy that underpins media art. In the exhibition Through All Your Senses, the Lee Ungno Museum is undertaking new ways of displaying Lee’s work using twenty-first century technologies. Through this display, audiences will have a more varied and multisensory experience of Lee’s art.