Lee Jung Seob

Lee Jung-seob (April 10, 1916 in Pyeongannamdo – September 6, 1956 in Seoul) was a Korean artist most known for his oil paintings, such as White Ox.

Life

Early years Born and raised in Korea under Japanese rule, Lee was born into an affluent family in Pyongwon County, South Pyongan Province in present-day North Korea. His family owned an extensive area of land, and Lee's brother, who was twelve years older than him, ran the biggest department store at the time in Wonsan. Lee's brother assumed a paternal role after their father's death in 1918. Lee attended Jongno Primary School in Pyongyang, and found his artistic calling when he encountered replicas of Goguryeo tomb murals at the Pyongyang Prefectural Museum near the elementary school. The grand scale and vivid wall paintings mesmerized a young Lee. In 1930, he began his art studies at Osan High School in Jeongju, which was independently financed by Korean Christian nationalists whose mission was to raise next-generation leaders in opposition to Japanese colonialism.

In 1932, Lee entered Teikoku Art School for Occidental Painting in Japan and studied art in earnest. In 1936, he went to Tokyo to attend the Imperial Art Institute. He abruptly quit in 1937 and entered Bunka Gakuin (Japanese: 文化學院), a liberal private academy that was more fascinated with the avant-garde than Teikoku. At Bunka Gakuin, Lee showed Fauvist tendencies and a strong, free-like drawing style. It was during this time that Lee made the bull his main subject in his paintings, identifying himself with the bull in his pursuit of Korean modernism. Amid his studies, Lee joined some of his senior classmates in displaying his works at an exhibition organized by the Free Artists' Association (自由美術家協会, Jiyū Bijutsuka Kyōkai). After his exhibited works drew critical acclaim, Lee was invited to join. At Bunka Gakuin, he fell deeply in love with junior colleague Yamamoto Masako (Japanese: 山本方子, Korean name Lee Nam-deok, in hangul: 이남덕) who would later become his wife.

Despite the rising tensions of the Pacific War, Lee was relatively safe within his school boundaries, gaining a liberal education in the face of imperial militarism. Lee graduated from Bunka Gakuin in 1941 and returned home to Wonsan in 1943 as panic surrounding the war grew in Tokyo. Lee continued to paint and organize art exhibitions in Seoul and Pyongyang undeterred by the wartime emergency in Colonial Korea. In April 1945, Masako traveled to Wonsan in the midst of the bombing of Japan, and the two were married the following month. By this time, Lee's family became desperately poor. Finding Busan overcrowded with other refugees and seeking a warmer climate, Lee moved his family further south to Jeju Island, the very southern tip of Korea.

Life on Jeju Lee and his family found the warm and pleasant life they hoped for in Seogwipo, Jeju, the southern coast of the island. The family spent an impoverished but mostly happy year together on the island. Lee's painting A Family on the Road (1951) shows a father leading a golden bull and a wagon with a mother and two sons tossing flowers and searching for Utopia. Despite hardships, Lee sketched and painted his surroundings, inspired by the local scenery, and gained new subject matter in seagulls, crabs, fish, the coast, and his growing children. Lee drew Family of Poet Ku Sang (1955), his yearning for familial love expressed in the portrait of Ku gifting his young son a tricycle. Lee was never able to save up enough money to move and be reunited. He never met his family again except for a short meeting for 5 days in Tokyo in 1953.

In January 1955, he held a private exhibition at the Midopa Gallery in a last-ditch effort to sell his works. Despite the exhibition's success, he remained heavily in debt as he never received the money for the twenty works sold. Ku Sang helped Lee organize another final exhibition at the Gallery of the US Information Service in Daegu in April, which reaped even worse results than the one in Seoul. Lee spiraled into a deep depression and castigated himself for not only failing as his family's provider but also as an artist.

Death He suffered from a type of schizophrenia credited to longings for his family and stress from life hardships. In his loneliness, Lee turned to alcohol and developed a severe anorexia. He continued his migratory lifestyle, moving between Seoul, Daegu, and Tongyeong until his death. He spent his final year in various hospitals and homes of friends. He worked on illustrations for literary magazines, including his River of No Return series.

On September 6, 1956, Lee died of hepatitis at age 40 alone at Seoul Red Cross Hospital. Friends of Lee had him cremated and sent some of his ashes to Masako in Japan. They then commissioned a tombstone for him at Manguri Public Cemetery in Seoul.

Style and Works

Artistic development Lee began his art studies at Osan School under the instruction of his high school teacher, Im Yong Ryeon, who studied drawing, oil painting, and historical murals at the Art Institute of Chicago (1923-26) and the Yale School of Fine Arts (1926-29).

Despite his years of strife, poverty, transience, and warfare, Lee produced paintings that laughed at the harshness of reality, expressing the blithe, childlike beauty of happy days spent with his family.

Works include Family with Chickens (1954-55), Twins (1950), The Sun and Children (1950s), and Children Playing in the Peach Garden (1954), oil on paper.

Cows Throughout his life, Lee created numerous paintings centered on the subject of the 'cow,' a creature that held a special place in his artistic universe. The cow speaks to the deep roots of the Korean people and is a modernist reflection of self. The white bull in particular came to symbolize Korea and the white-robed Korean people. Scholars and historians

Paintings

Lee Jung Seob has produced many works during his lifetime. Some of his paintings include:

White Ox – 흰 소, 1954 (exhibited in Museum of Modern Art) Fighting Ox – 싸우는 소 Fish and the Kids – 물고기와 아이들, 1950 The Family and the Dove – 가족과 비둘기, 1956