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Lee Ung-no was born in 1904. He was one of the great Korean painters of the 20th century, with deep roots in traditional Korean painting. Lee learned traditional techniques, particularly calligraphic brushwork in black ink, and became known for his paintings of bamboo. As a young artist, he made a living through traditional painting. In the 1920s and 1930s, there was still steady demand for such works, as wealthy households often decorated their homes with paintings and calligraphy.
Lee experienced Korea's liberation from Japanese colonial rule in 1945 and the Korean War, which broke out in 1950. These turbulent historical events must have had a profound impact on him, as they did on many Korean artists of his generation.
In Viewing Mount Geumgang from Jeongyangsa Temple (mid-1950s), Lee depicted Mount Geumgang, which is now located in North Korea. He had traveled to the mountain in 1941, when he was in his thirties, before the division of Korea became permanent. Mount Geumgang had long been a favorite subject and destination for Korean painters. After the Korean War, however, people in South Korea could no longer visit it freely. Lee returned to the mountain through his memories and earlier sketches, depicting its dramatic landscape with powerful movements of the ink brush.
Lee was a prolific artist and produced thousands of works throughout his life. His background in calligraphy and ink painting allowed him to work with a speed and spontaneity quite different from those required by traditional oil painting.
By the late 1950s, Lee was moving toward abstraction. Viewing Mount Geumgang from Jeongyangsa Temple still depicts a recognizable landscape in considerable detail, but his late-1950s painting Forest is strikingly different. Instead of carefully describing individual trees, he expressed his experience of the forest through spontaneous, seemingly disorderly strokes of a broad brush. The trees gradually dissolve into lines, rhythms, and movements. It was a movement away from the restraints of representation and toward a new visual language rooted in traditional ink painting.
Lee later moved to France, where he supported himself by selling his works and teaching East Asian painting and calligraphy. His encounter with European modern art further expanded his artistic language, while the brushwork he had learned as a young man remained at its core.
In the 1980s, Lee increasingly focused on his famous Crowd series. Hundreds, sometimes seemingly thousands, of tiny human figures fill the surface of his paintings. Each person is reduced to only a few strokes of the brush, yet every figure seems to move differently. Together they express the desires, struggles, joys, and sorrows of human life.
These late paintings have a remarkable sense of movement. The people do not simply stand still; they seem to dance, march, struggle, and move forward together. Perhaps this is what makes Lee's paintings so powerful. They seem to recognize the different circumstances of each viewer while giving us a feeling that, despite everything, life continues and we can move forward to the next step.
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