Behind the Sculptures of Lee Ungno

In this work, the black-painted shape also has a hole in the middle, which makes it look like an organism. It is a drawing that shows the characteristics of a sculpture of Lee Ungno, which absorbs the space outside of the work and also penetrates air.

A pedestal is drawn under two abstract forms that also look like a human being, indicating that it is a drawing for a sculpture.

This is Lee Ungno’s drawing of <people> sculpture painted in red and black pen. It features the person with an open arm, a figure with his(her) arms on the side of his face, or a figure that looks like (s)he is greeting others are depicted.

The signature is on the right side of the bottom, which makes it looks like part of the work.

From the late 1960s to early 1980s, Lee Ungno produced a multitude of sculptural works, in-the-round carvings, and reliefs using a variety of materials, including wood. He used not only paper and pigments but many other materials easily accessible to him in his daily life to materialize his desire for artistic creation, resulting in the production of works that were all quite consistent in terms of artistic sensibility, regardless of the materials he used.

In the work shown here, Lee used tiny pieces of wood of different lengths to portray a forest of skyscrapers in a large city. Each of the rectangular wooden columns of different heights is nothing but a tiny unit; when packed together with numerous others, however, they create an imposing landscape of a megacity.

This sculptural work reminds some viewers of Lee’s calligraphic abstract paintings, where the element of abstractness is uniquely amalgamated with that of figurativeness, while others see it as a prototype of the paintings of Lee’s later years, which depict large crowds of people, each of whom were created with only a few simple brushstrokes.

This unique sculptural work was created by shaping a form using paper scraps tempered with sticky cooked rice and painting it with ink. Lee started producing the works of his “Starchy Rice Sculpture” series, such as the one shown here, in 1967, when was imprisoned for two years for his involvement in the Dongbaengnim (East Berlin) Incident, causing him to lose access to materials for his artistic activities. Finding that the versatility of cooked rice and paper made them suitable as materials for sculptures, Lee Ungno continued to use the materials and techniques he learned in prison even after his release, leading to the creation of many similar works, including People and this work, entitled Composition, which was completed in 1980.

A closer look at the work reveals traces of the artist’s finger work with paper dough and the ink-brushed part of the surface to infuse life into the finished work. Lee’s sculptural works, such as this one, are sometimes compared to papier collé of the early 1960s, a type of collage in which paper is applied to a flat mount and painted.

This particular work features a rough, untrimmed form that is open to the outside world and sometimes compared to a certain living creature or even a human being with open arms. Lee Ungno once said that when he worked on paper sculptures, he often thought about his mother working with starch and paper to make large bowls. This work is a fine example of Lee’s artworks that combine materials and aesthetic experimentation to create a perfect artistic whole.

While imprisoned for his involvement in the East Berlin Affair, Lee Ungno painted using almost every material around him that he could find, in order to overcome his inability to paint there. He collected veneers to make sculptural forms and used soy sauce, which was served at mealtimes, as pigments.

Since he noticed that some inmates at the An-yang Prison used rice paste to make jang-gy (Asian chess) pieces, he started to collect discarded rice from his or other inmates’ meals and sometimes got rice from the prison messenger in order to make models.

Made of rice paste, an evidence of the artist’s passion for art, this work evokes his Abstract Letter series. The abstractive forms are built flat but the whole construction exudes a sense of volume.

This wooden in-the-round carving sculpture looks like a form created by piling up brushstrokes taken from Lee’s calligraphic abstract paintings to create a three-dimensional figure. While the basic principle governing Chinese characters, pictograms and ideograms is the expression of three-dimensional figures as simple two-dimensional symbols, that of the abstract sculpture, such as that shown here, is the representation of two-dimensional symbols as three-dimensional life forms.

This sculpture, while made of hardwood, features a form that reminds viewers of the two-dimensional brushstrokes of East Asian calligraphy, which tend to continue to run though looking perilous. The elegantly curved lines outlining the shape of the sculpture run in a natural, organic manner, as if they are an integral part of the wooden structure.

The work features a large, seemingly heavy part supported by a smaller, and thus lighter, bottom part with three short legs that appear vulnerable. However, the harmony between the elegance of the curved lines that form the masses and the empty spaces that exist among them helps create a remarkable sense of stability.