Georgetown University Art historian Ian Bourland
After decades of exhibitions in South Korea, to encounter Lee Choun Hwan’s paintings in London is a rare gift, but only if we allow ourselves to see his work on its own terms. His richly-textured mountains—rendered in vibrant hues—likely strike a European viewer as something deeply familiar, something we have somehow seen before. But that is a mistake.
For decades, Korean artists have been a mainstay of the contemporary market, fully enmeshed in the formal and conceptual registers of the global avant-garde.1) For instance, starting in the 1960s, abstract painting, in particular, was a vital space of experimentation in which transnational dialogues around style and meaning were crystalized in new ways by tansaekhwa artists such as Kwon Young-woo and Lee Ufan. More recently, the politically infused, post-formalist modalities of performance, installation, and lens-based media have typified work by younger generations.2) In this light, the Lee Choun Hwan’s Rooted Island paintings, though aesthetically absorbing, might register for some as anachronistic—a throwback to the 19th century heyday of the landscape genre in Europe and the United States.
Such returns could be seen as surprising as, in many ways, the advent of European modernism over one hundred years ago engendered a broad suspicion of landscape painting and, especially, its spiritual undertones. Where Piet Mondrian began as a painter of the marine expanses of the Dutch coast or Paul Cézanne of radiant hillsides in Provence, they and countless others were subsumed by the inexorable “purification” of abstraction, the “elementarization” of the world into flat geometries. In turn, the arresting sublimity of storm-struck mountains or the picturesque course of a sinuous river found throughout the preceding century dissipated into open expanses of pigment. And while gestures toward our environment were never fully effaced in history of abstraction, those gestures came into view only glancingly.
This shift from the pictorial to the abstract was, for many, synonymous with modernity. Those who continued to work in once-dominant genres such as landscape thus risked their painting being construed as an exercise in nostalgia or cliché. From the vantage of many modernists, the lessons of landscape had already been internalized—lessons, ironically, purloined from the very eastern Asian traditions that Lee Choun Hwan recasts here. Indeed, it is a well-known story that European painters breaking with the academic modes that predominated during the mid-19th century turned their attention to popular forms of landscape that had been institutionalized in Korea and Japan for centuries. Mary Cassatt, Claude Monet, Vincent Van Gogh, and their respective circles were immersed in the visual culture of Edo-period ukiyo-e prints.3) In this way, they and others were impressed by the value of painting in nature rather than mimicking it, and by the power of the bounding line or bold block of color in rendering the environs beyond the city. While such artists tended to conflate eastern Asian cultures (and, certainly, the history of cultural exchange between Korea and Japan per se is both complex), many stylistic elements that resonated with early European modernists could, too by found in canonical Korean painting of the era—for example, the depiction of real places and repeated impressions of key regional landscapes in the “true view” style that effloresced during the 17th-19th centuries.
Similarly, Chosōn-era works of ink and color by artists such as Chōng Su-yōng demonstrated a boldly abstract approach to depicting forest and mountain that overtly presage both post-Impressionism and Lee’s most recent work alike.4) While landscape was long a venerable tradition in the Korean context, it had comparatively shallow roots in Europe, associated as it was with the emotional pitch of Romanticism, and the aesthetic register of the picturesque. Early modernists opportunistically incorporated lessons from the edges of European empire to bring new psychic or technical energy to their practice, their engagements with the arts of eastern Asia were often superficial, and generally limited to the years before World War I.
Certainly, there was a resurgence of interest in Asian aesthetics during the ensuing years, when American servicemen, in particular, were stationed in the Pacific up to and including South Korea and Vietnam. This, and cross-cultural exchange in the realms of avant-garde culture and spirituality during this period also meant that the experimental practices of many leading figures in late-modernism were steeped in variations of Mahayana Buddhist precepts.
Nonetheless, while John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Minor White, and others were plainly inspired by, say, the writings D.T. Suzuki or forms of popularized Hindu mysticism, even this current has long been downplayed in the market and the historical record. Writing in 2009, curator Alexandra Munroe argued that, “while American artists’ interest in Asian art and thought has hardly gone unnoticed, no rigorous study has ever defined the terms of Eastern philosophy and aesthetics in the United States … This is not surprising since such consideration of the intersection between modern American art and Asian classical arts and philosophical systems requires familiarity with both subjects and their different discourses. Traditionally, these have been separate purviews in academy and museum.”5) In short, the secular impulses of much modernism, and the detached “criticality” that predominates in contemporary art world discourse mean that to understand the spiritual dimension at the core of paintings such as Lee Choun Hwan’s requires a recalibration—a turn to a real but long-submerged history of transregional exchange.6)
In some ways, landscape did gradually return to “western” contemporary art, but at the cost of being dissociated from its earlier affective and spiritual connotations, and regarded with skepticism. Indeed, by the 1970s, a range of post-marxist approaches began to re-read early instances of landscape painting as part-and-parcel of Euro-American colonial projects both in the global south and closer to home.7) At the same time, in the hands of the “new topographic” photographers of the era (and successors like Edward Burtynsky and Richard Misrach) contemporary rendering of landscape became vehicles for critiquing territorial expansion and environmental despoliation. Elsewhere, it was revived in more ironic registers, sentimental associations in full view in, as in the panoramic sunrises and sunsets undertaken by Roy Lichtenstein beginning in 1965. This was “landscape” in quotation marks, an old genre reanimated as symbolic game.
Nonetheless, with their day-glo magna palette and intense graphic quality, Lichtenstein’s “pop” landscapes are, for many viewers, perhaps the closest visual precedent to Lee’s Rooted Island suite—seen most clearly in The Mood of the Mountain #49 (2019) and #427 (2021). But visual symmetries aside, this is where the latter’s cloud-bound pinnacles begin to confound a comparative analysis. Beyond the comparatively shallow (but apparently exhausted) American precedent, Lee’s paintings reach back to a lineage that simultaneously predates and inflects the former. Here, he re-infuses that tradition with new energy, using a distinctive style: his is an overt reconfiguration of Korean aesthetic criteria that might be, in the first instance, illegible in a Euro-centric art world. As other commenters have noted well, Lee came to prominence first as a skilled ink-wash painter, and his more experimental work over the past decade refers directly to the austere white porcelain ceramics of the later Chosōn dynasty by centering a “moon jar” amid interlaced fields of the five obangsaek colors.
While the landscapes of Rooted Island plainly evoke the ink-wash tradition of depicting Korean peaks amid rolling mists or currents of water, they are, according to Lee, also subtly imbued with elements of Korean Buddhism, attributable to his chance meeting with the late monk Bōpjōng. This meeting, evidently, shifted the former’s approach from more literal depictions to currents of abstraction that allow him to draw forth ephemeral dimensions of the objects and landscapes around us. In The Mood of the Mountain series, Lee thus attempts to merge form and spirit dialogically, recasting seemingly familiar approaches to painting in a new synthesis. For all that, we must be careful not to overdetermine Lee’s as an essentially "Korean” art, lest we repeat a common fallacy of the contemporary market, to reduce singular works to reductive instances of “difference.”
For its part, Lee’s approach is avowedly idiosyncratic rather than merely re-iterative. The mountains here were realized through a process oriented around a distinctive place, Lee’s natal island of Wando, on the far southern shore of the Korean peninsula. While the rough textures of his canvases are built up from traditional hanji, they also rely on the infusion of fragmented stone. Like his choice to work on horizontally oriented canvases, this material sensibility marks a clear break with historical precedent, and opens into larger conversations around locality and ecology that animate mixed-media and sculptural practices around the world.
Such incandescent peaks will likely resonate in Seoul no less than London, calling to mind other snow-capped ranges, other histories of painting. The challenge of Lee’s art, then, is that it uses a familiar language that is by turns legible and illegible from context to context. By short-circuiting such expectations, these moody mountains demand something more from us—to be present with them, without preconception.
1) The examples are too numerous to note. For an overview, Keith B. Wagner and Sunjung Kim, “The Gwangju Biennale, Busan Biennale, and Mediacity Seoul: Co-Cultural Aspirations and Globalization in Korea,” in Korean Art from 1953: Collision, Innovation, Interaction, ed. Keith Wagner, et al. (London: Phaidon, 2020), 209-245.
2) See Joan Kee, Contemporary Korean Art: Tansaekhwa and the Urgency of Method (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
3) This is a well-known history, and is made evident in various letters by Paul Cézanne and Vincent van Gogh written in the late 1880s, collected in, e.g. Herschel B. Chipp, ed. Theories of Modern Art: A Sourcebook for Artists and Critics (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1968), 11-47.
4) See Yi Sōng-mi, “Artistic Tradition and the Depiction of Reality” True-View Landscape Painting of the Chosōn Dynasty, in Arts of Korea, ed. Judith G. Smith (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998), 331-365.
5) Alexandra Munroe, “The Third Mind: An Introduction,” The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989 ed. Alexandra Munroe (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2009), 22. See also Harry Harootunian, “Postwar America and the Aura of Asia,” in the same volume, 45-55.
6) On this, see also Ming Tiampo, “Originality, Universality, and Other Modernist Myths,” in Art and Globalization, ed. James Elkins, et al. (College Station: Penn State University Press, 2010), 166-170.
7) Summarized in the WJT Mitchell, ed., Landscape and Power (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994).
March 31, 2022
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