At MMCA Deoksugung, Lee Dai-won’s luminous orchards reveal Korean modernism decades ahead of its time

Rarely has there been an artist in Korea as prolific outside the field of art as painter Lee Dai-won (1921-2005). He served as an art patron, as the founding dean of Hongik University’s art college and later its president, and as an administrator, adviser and cultural diplomat.

That is not to say his art was less significant than that of his peers. Pointing to Lee’s paintings, which span more than half a century, the curators of “Nothing Here Makes You Sad,” a new retrospective opening at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea’s (MMCA) Deoksugung branch on Thursday, say, “K-art arrived some 60 years before anyone had a term for it.”

“The color of embroidery, the light of traditional mother-of-pearl, the dots and lines of ink painting — in the great late canvases these come together as a completed landscape space, one in which East Asian thought has been fully absorbed and then expressed,” said Bae Won-jung, main curator for the exhibition, at a press conference at the MMCA Deoksugung on Wednesday. “I would like people to see that and recognize it as K-art, and to recognize that Lee was already thinking it through and practicing it 60 years ago.”

“Nothing Here Makes You Sad” includes 120 oil paintings and 100 archival items borrowed from more than 50 lenders in Korea, Japan and the United States. It is the first large retrospective for Lee, a painter who held 19 solo shows and has attracted almost no sustained scholarship.

“Behind the brightness there was meticulous formal experimentation,” Bae said. “Passing through the upheavals of modern Korean history, he completed his own narrative not through dramatic events in his life but through change and achievement inside painting itself.”

The statement carrying most significance is the one about embroidery. Lee’s orchards have been filed under Impressionism and Pointillism for decades, mostly because the surfaces are built from bright dots. Bae disagrees.

“When paints are mixed, each color disappears and what you get is an intermediate tone,” Bae said. “But threads keep their own color even when laid side by side — a red thread and a blue thread run in parallel without fusing into one. That is exactly why Lee could set dots of pure color side by side and never have them blend. Georges Seurat’s dots mix in the eye. Lee’s dots do not."

Nacre gets the same treatment. Where Impressionism disperses light optically, najeon — the traditional Korean craft of inlaying mother-of-pearl — fixes it on the surface and materializes it. The second gallery at “Nothing Here Makes You Sad” hangs the paintings among the embroidery, mother-of-pearl, ox-horn work and old furniture that Lee collected, and alongside a wax-resisted, dyed folding screen he entered in the craft division of the Joseon Art Exhibition in 1938, the same year he was selected in the Western painting division. It has never been publicly shown before.

The phrase Lee’s contemporaries used about him is treated as a research question rather than a compliment.

“People kept describing Lee’s work as ‘an Oriental painting made with Western paints,’ and everyone simply repeated it afterward,” Bae said. “I was personally very curious about what the substance of that phrase actually was.”

The curator’s answer runs through master painter Byeon Gwan-sik, whose landscapes Lee once annotated in a newspaper column, praising not the mood or the motif but the brushwork, composition and textured strokes.

Which is also why the show refuses to read the orchards that Lee famously painted on repetition as one late style.

“The canvases from the 1970s have recession and a stacked composition; while in the 1980s the near, middle and far distances compress, and the dots stretch into lines with direction,” Bae said. “After the 1990s, the far distance disappears, and the surface flattens. It changed continuously for 30 years.”

The final section of the four-section exhibition gives the five- and seven-meter (16- and 23-feet) paintings a mirrored floor, so the orchard runs out under the visitor’s feet and the eye cannot settle anywhere. This is Bae’s case for wayu, or roaming a landscape while reclining: the picture stops being a view and becomes somewhere to walk.

Only here does “the happiest painter in the world,” a label often given to Lee, become useful — Lee, who ran the influential Bando Gallery in postwar Korea without taking a single won in salary, funded the first private open-call competition out of his own pocket, spoke five languages to the foreign buyers passing through the Bando Hotel, and finished as a cultural envoy for the Foreign Ministry.

“Because of that glittering record of Lee’s career outside art, people have seen him superficially — as a painter who had everything, a man born lucky,” Bae said. “If that is how you have read him, I would like this exhibition to show you where his painting actually arrived.”

The title of the exhibition, “Nothing Here Makes You Sad,” comes from the archaeologist Kim Won-yong, a close friend of Lee’s since middle school, who said of the artist’s paintings: “There is absolutely nothing there to make a person sad.”

The exhibition’s official catalog reads that quote not as a report on an untroubled life but as its opposite — a man carrying four careers’ worth of titles who set them down on weekends, sat in the middle of the orchard, and turned the weight into lightness rather than putting it on show as tragedy.

“Nothing Here Makes You Sad” runs at the MMCA Deoksugung until Nov. 8. Admission for adults is 2,000 won ($1.40), plus an additional 1,000 won fee for entrance to Deoksu Palace.

BY LIM JEONG-WON [lim.jeongwon@joongang.co.kr]