Explore Lee Ungno's Marco Polo Series

In 1980, Lee Ungno produced 79 landscape illustrations based on these accounts of Marco Polo’s travels. He produced his illustrations at the request of a writer who wanted to use them for his travelogue book. Lee Ungno did not create his illustrations after reading any particular book on the subject, but rather created them based on the stories he heard secondhand. He was instantly attracted to the stories of the great traveler and produced fine pieces of art that were so vivid that it was almost as if Lee Ungno himself, not Marco Polo, had traveled across the unknown world.

These illustrations show that Lee Ungno had just as great of a desire as Marco Polo to explore the unknown and to embark on great adventures.

Lee Ungno’s illustrations of The Travels of Marco Polo depict landscapes recreated through the artist’s own eyes and boast a mysterious beauty, formed as the eyes of the East (Lee Ungno’s) intersect with those of the West (Marco Polo’s). Completed using brush techniques characteristic of traditional East Asian landscape painting, the illustrations appear to be more focused on reality and nature and value content over form. While the landscapes in the illustrations were not directly copied from nature, they provide a wealth of information on the artist’s viewpoint and the stories he wanted to share with his viewers.

This technique is certainly different from the techniques typically used by Western landscape artists, who seek to express objective elements such as form, light, and color observed from a fixed viewpoint.

Lee Ungno believed that he could express his subjects more carefully and elaborately and could view them as more important if he found them to be closely related to the human mind. He also found that he simplified or even omitted parts of his subjects is he found them to be less significant.

His artistic decisions in this sense seem to help viewers focus more on the “inner form” of the subjects depicted and excite and expand the imagination of viewers.

Even in his illustrations of Marco Polo’s adventures, Lee Ungno remains faithful to the traditions of East Asian landscape painting, in which an object’s structure is seen as more important than changes in light and shading.

As previously mentioned, Lee Ungno did not read the Marco Polo’s travelogue, but rather created his illustrations based on his own memories of the travel accounts that he had been told.

Lee Ungno believed that the forms in his memories better represented the characteristic features of the subjects he depicted. He also believed that the process of recalling memories helped remove all the unessential elements of a subject, capturing only its core.

The illustrations of The Travels of Marco Polo, created by Lee Ungno using a variety of artistic techniques developed in East Asia, are so vivid that they are often mistakenly viewed as works created by an artist who actually traveled to each individual place.