Zoom Into Lee Ungno's Collage 'Composition (1961)'

Right after his arrival in Paris, Lee Ungno immersed him in collage.

He began tearing up magazines...

... discarded hanji and newspapers, dividing the pieces by colour and pasting them onto his canvas.

His collage was non-figurative with great matière and this, in a broad sense, demonstrates the influence of European Art Informel, which was fashionable at that time. What distinguished his collage from Western collage, however, was the manner of his dealing with collage mediums.

Rather than simply cutting out papers and pasting them together, as one might in Western collage, Ungno pasted different mediums onto his canvas and randomly removed them; he scratched away at the mediums to reveal another layer underneath; he puts pigments on the mediums.

The paper cut up in this work is immensely transformed, as the original shapes are not recognisable, instead functioning as colourful elements within the work.