Lee Seung Jio (1941-1990) received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Department of Painting at Hongik University. In 1963, he founded artist groups Origin and the Korean Avant-garde Association, AG with his colleagues. He was the recipient of the Special Selection Award at the National Art Exhibition of the Republic of Korea in 1971; and the Korea Fine Art Grand Prize Exhibition in 1980. From 1981 to 1988, he served on the faculty of the Painting Department at Chung-Ang University.
Lee Seung Jio, also known as “pipe painter,” is a geometric abstract painter. In the 1960s when the Korean art scene was intensely drawn to Informel and Abstract Expressionism, Lee went against the trend and founded an artist group called Origin in an attempt to return to a more fundamental aesthetic language. In his life-long search of rational and logical geometric abstraction, the painter consistently depicted mechanical forms with cold and metallic pipe-like sensibilities, all under the same title “Nucleus,” until his passing away in 1990, with his ultimate goal being the pursuit of meticulous and orderly plasticity. Pipes were not mere pipes to him. They were neither objects nor a symbol of modern civilization, but an illusion resulting from visual deception that reveals materiality by repetition. Lee delved into this optical phenomenon and came to think of it as “nucleus.” That all his paintings were titled “Nucleus” hints at his belief that optical illusion is the core. Visual deception, or the illusion as its outcome, is the most fundamental essence of painting, and the beginning―or nucleus―of all visual experiences enabled by painting. From 1963 to 1967, he experimented with geometric abstraction with other Origin member artists, and his works from this phase show a stronger than ever tendency toward Opt Art. The following period between 1968 and 1973 can be marked by his attempt to establish three-dimensional space on his canvas by using metallic cylindrical forms. When the cylindrical forms are mistaken for pipes, an ultimate optical illusion is achieved, and from there the painter establishes a meticulous order of space, stacking the pipes of various sizes and lengths, or juxtaposing them with a single color-field. During the mid-1970s, he released some monochrome paintings with a weakened association of pipes, but at the beginning of the next decade, he firmly established his artistic style of dialectically combining threedimensional space and the single color plane with a touch of optical art.
