The Life and Work of Lee Ungno in Paris

In 1957, the World House Gallery in New York included two of Lee’s paintings—Sailing and Mountains—in its Korean Contemporary Art exhibition. Soon after, the two paintings were donated to the Museum of Modern Art in New York through the Rockefeller Foundation. This greatly encouraged Lee to venture into the international art scene.

In 1958, Jacques Lassaigne, who served as the head of the French branch of the International Association of Art Critics at that time, invited Lee (who was 54 years old) to Paris.

His flight to Paris to participate in an exhibition in the heart of the Western art world made the headlines of most daily newspapers in Korea.

Many artists wrote about the exhibition, Goam, Lee Ungno: Flight to France, at the public information office in Seoul for the newspapers day after day.

At the recommendation of Dr. Hertz, who was the West German ambassador to Korea at the time, Lee headed to Germany only a week after he arrived in Paris.

Many local papers reported his exhibition in the main section as the first Korean modern art exhibition in West Germany.

Over the next year, he traveled to three German cities - Frankfurt, Cologne, and Bonn - and held four exhibitions before once again returning to Paris.

In Paris with Shin Moon in the 1960s

In contrast to European collages, which were typically made by pasting geometric paper shapes on canvas, Ungno tore pages from magazines, divided them by color, and glued them together to create layers.

He opened new doors for Eastern abstract painting by incorporating the Chinese characters and calligraphy he had learned and practiced since childhood into his paintings.

The sounds and meanings of Chinese characters which are, in essence, pictographs and abstractions of natural forms, are expressed in the form of strokes and dots.

In the early phase of his Abstract Letter series, Lee reinterpreted modern abstract painting with a calligraphic style, combining hieroglyphic-like characters written on a planar surface with the unintentional effect of smudged ink on hanji (traditional Korean paper). In his later work, he increasingly disassembled, transformed, and reassembled the geometrical forms of the letters.

Lee focused on the abstract patterns of hangeul (the Korean alphabet) and hanja (Chinese characters), combining patterns to create numerous variations.

In 1964, Lee founded the Académie de Peinture Orientale de Paris at the Musée Cernuschi in Paris, and taught local people traditional Korean painting and calligraphy.

V. Elisseeff, the director of Musée Cernuschi, helped Lee establish the Académie, with the support of many artists including H. Hartung, P. Soulages, Fujita, and Zao Wou-Ki.

As the only institute of East-Asian art in Europe, the Académie was a bridgehead for Korean art into Europe, where there was little understanding of Korean culture.

With painter Ji-ho Oh

In 1976, Lee opened the Goryeo Gallery as a regular venue to present the works of students of the Académie de Peinture Orientale de Paris. After Lee’s death, his widow, Park In-kyung, and their son, painter Lee Young-sé, continued to spread his teachings. To date, about 3,000 students have graduated from the Académie. In 2014, Lee’s widow and son founded the Goam Academy in Vaux-sur-Seine, on the outskirts of Paris, in a building designed by Swiss architect Jean-Michel Wilmotte.

Teaching students at the Academy of Oriental Painting, 1988. Almost all the pictures in Academy were taken by his son.(Artist Lee Young-sé)