Lee Seung Jio

Nucleus F-G-999 is a landmark of postwar abstraction—and forms a unique bridge between Minimalism and Op art in the West and avant-gardes in the East.

Its maker, Lee Seung Jio, propelled Korean art into the future. Born in 1941 in northern Korea, he fled south after the country’s liberation from Japanese rule at the end of World War II. His family stayed in Busan during the Korean War, then settled in Seoul, where Lee studied Western painting at Hongik University. When the April Revolution broke out in 1960, Lee joined the affiliated social movement, and in 1962 he founded the Origin Group of avant-garde artists, seeking to develop a truly transnational modernism—one that did not follow Western or Japanese techniques but looked, instead, to the Apollo launch and the space race, to new technologies, to science fiction. Lee became a driving force for artistic innovation in a country divided against itself—and his art was a beacon throughout decades of political upheaval and breakneck industrial and economic development.

Riding on a train one day in the 1960s, on a newly constructed railway near Seoul, Lee closed his eyes and experienced the fleeting sensation of light and speed, of scenes flashing by. He was inspired to begin painting his signature series, which he called Nucleus. Lee experimented with ways of conveying the experience of the nuclear age, of Cold War military-industrial construction, and of the flows of energy and power that were starting to course through the South Korean landscape. Rejecting the gestural abstraction of European Art Informel, Lee invented a form of geometric abstraction that nevertheless depicted the changing world around him. He primed and then scraped down his canvases, over and over, to create an unusually hard, smooth surface onto which he pulled wide brushes, dipped on either end in paint, to create dazzlingly illusionistic gradients with each precise stroke. Resembling metallic pipes, fluorescent tubes, fuel rods, and electric or even musical vibration all at once, Nucleus F-G-999 is Lee’s breakthrough artwork. He laid down meticulous campaigns of fire-engine red, copper tones, and black and white to create a pulsating field of light. At the same time, the picture evokes the infrastructure of heavy industry, and the sense that we ourselves are embedded deep within the machine. Lee had found a way to convert painterly traces into a sculptural manifestation of material and technological fact. This work found a new audience when it was shown at the São Paulo Bienal of 1971; and it would make possible the later exploration of abstraction and the monochrome in Dansaekhwa painting, of which MoMA holds key examples, including Park Seo-bo’s Writing 59-74-77, Ha Chong-Hyun’s Conjunction 74-26, and Chung Chang-Sup’s Return 77-A.

Lee’s work confronts nothing less than the transformation of society in the atomic era. Having this work on view at MoMA allows us to more fully engage a complex, postcolonial, and transnational modernism.