Lee Jong-gu turns 'Pensive' in self-reflective solo exhibition at Hakgojae Gallery

Veteran painter Lee Jong-gu, a central figure in Korea's 1980s minjung art movement — a politically engaged current that emerged in opposition to authoritarian rule and rapid industrialization — opened his solo exhibition “Pensive” at Hakgojae Gallery in Jongno District, central Seoul, on Wednesday. The show presents 38 paintings that mark a turn from Lee's decades of social realism toward what curators are calling a more contemplative angle.

The show centers on the bangasayusang, the contemplative bodhisattva figures housed in the National Museum of Korea’s “Room of Quiet Contemplation.”

Lee, 72, places the seated bronze figures alongside nude bodies, flames, waves and crowd scenes, drawing on the Buddhist concept of bul-i — non-duality — to argue that the sacred and the profane, life and death, are not separate.

“In my earlier days as a minjung artist, I was deeply involved in exposing the harsh realities of everyday life and fighting against injustice,” Lee said during a press conference held at Hakgojae Gallery on Wednesday. “But going through the Covid-19 pandemic and spending time in self-reflection, I came to realize that fighting alone cannot solve the problem.”

Lee rose to prominence in the 1980s by painting portraits of farmers directly onto government-issued rice sacks, a body of work now considered a monument of Korean social realism. The new paintings retain that political grounding — one canvas, titled “Pensive_Yeto (Palestine)” (2025), invokes the Buddhist term for a world of suffering to address the war in Gaza, but folded into a broader inquiry into mortality, the body and the limits of confrontation.

The artist said his recent illness, retirement from Chung-Ang University, and long walks through the Jirisan trails reshaped his thinking. 

“Sentient beings and the Buddha are not two,” he said. “I deliberately joined two canvases together. The two become one, and the one becomes two.”

He stressed that the bodhisattva figures are not devotional objects for him.

“Korean traditional art is all Buddhist art in the end,” Lee said. “But I didn’t bring it in as an object of worship. I saw it as a posture of being, an attitude of contemplation.”

The works took years of physical labor — “painting is labor,” Lee said — and required him to unlearn old habits.

“I've been painting something all my life, but making an empty surface turned out to be the hardest thing.”

“Pensive” runs through June 20 at the Hakgojae Gallery. Admission is free.

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