Lee Hung-duk (b. 1953) received his bachelor’s degree from the Department of Painting at Chung-Ang University in 1979 and his master’s degree from the Department of Painting at Hongik University Graduate School in 1984. He held solo exhibitions at various venues including Han River Art Museum in 1985; National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea, currently MMCA in 1990; Kumho Museum of Art in 1993; Hangaram Museum of Seoul Arts Center in 2006; “A City: Desires and Scenes of Our Times” at Gallery Hangil in 2011;
and “On the Subway to Hell” at Namu Gallery in 2017. He also participated in various group exhibitions including “Group DaMu” at ARKO Art Center in 1981; “Art of Life” at Arab Cultural Center in 1984; “Controversial Artists of the Year of 1986” at Seoul Museum of Art in 1987; “Contemporary Art’s Eye and Formativeness” at MMCA Deoksugung in 1990; “Today’s Life-Today’s Art” at Kumho Museum of Art in 1992; “Moving Museum” at National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea, currently MMCA, in 1997-98; “The 1980’s Realism and the Age” at Gana Art Center in 2001; and “Memory of Violence” at Busan Democracy Park in 2005. He is the recipient of the 2nd Korean Artist Award in 2018.
Lee Hung-duk expresses modern life through everyday places within the city and the hidden side of such places―that is, desire, anxiety and wounds―in a satirical way. The urban landscapes presented by Lee are comprised of spaces where ordinary people’s daily lives take place, including bars, cafes, streets, new towns, subway, and so on. Lee once remarked, “Our lives are all linked to one another in relative relationships,” and indeed, residents of a city are entangled in diverse relationships: haves and have-nots, good and evil, and men and women. These relationships engender physical and structural violence and anxiety. In other words, his paintings from the 1980s tell stories of the common people’s anxiety and sense of loss by depicting them in urban places like cafes or streets. In contrast, however, the works produced after the mid-1990s are often set in a new town or a subway train and expose the oppression imposed by the capitalistic value system and scenes in the anxiety-filled daily lives of ordinary people.
