1945–2009 Online Platform for Korean Modern and Contemporary Art

Artist of the Year 2005 Lee Jonggu "Lee Jonggu, Painter of Rural Korea"

Rural Korea The theme of this exhibition is “our countryside.” Over the past three decades, rural Korea has been weathering the rough waves of industrialization, urbanization, and globalization and undergoing a devastating collapse. Particularly since the 1980s, plummeting government purchase prices for rice, upheaval in cattle prices, and the opening of the market to agricultural imports have shaken the rural economy to its foundations, bringing its structural contradictions to a head. Lee Jonggu is the artist who has confronted this harsh reality directly. Lee is not a figurative painter who merely renders farmers and rural landscapes in a hyper-realistic or romantic manner. He is a realist artist who, from a critically informed view of reality, has immersed himself in their lives and shared their concerns and pain, expressing their anger, resistance, and hope. He is also an innovative artist who boldly introduces unconventional materials—including rice sacks, dining tables, farm tools, election posters, and leaflets—to reveal the inner lives of farmers with greater subtlety and effectiveness. Within the circumstances of his time and the society in which he works, Lee has continually agonized over and reflected on the duty and role of the artist. Lee Jonggu was born the son of a farmer in Oji-ri, Daesan-myeon, Seosan-gun, South Chungcheong Province, South Korea. He did not, in fact, paint rural life from the outset. After studying Western painting at university, he began his career as an artist in earnest following his discharge from military service in 1979. The president had been assassinated and martial law declared, and a dark, ominous mood pervaded society. Monochrome painting dominated the art world at the time. Distancing himself from abstraction, Lee painted in a hyper-realistic mode. He was more interested in matters of content—human existence and communication with the public—than in formal experiments. He mainly chose cold urban images such as a traffic sign bearing the word “Danger,” asphalt, and paving blocks, which directly reflected the rigid and repressive Korean society of the early 1980s. Yet the city was unfamiliar subject matter for him in many respects. He repeatedly reflected upon his identity and the roots of his life, eventually turning to his father, a farmer. As a result, in 1984, Lee began making the “paintings of farmers” for which he is now well known. This solo exhibition is organized into four chronological sections and brings together major works ranging from 1984, when Lee first began painting farmers, to recent works from 2005. The sections are “1984–1990: My Hometown, Oji-ri,” “1991–1994: Dejected Anger of the Farmers,” “1995–2000: Planting the Seed of Hope,” and “2001–2005: Our Land, Our People.” 1984–1990: My Hometown, Oji-ri The paintings produced between 1984 and 1990 can be broadly divided into three groups: “Father,” “The People of Oji-ri,” and “Rural Life and Reality.” All the works from this period were painted on rice sacks—either vinyl or paper—and occasionally incorporate printed matter or letters. Centered on his native village of Oji-ri, they convey both the artist’s warm affection for rural life and the deep anguish of farmers who were losing hope. History–My Father (1984) is significant in two major respects: it was Lee’s first work to take his father as its subject and his first painting on a rice sack. He reportedly first painted his father on canvas rather than sack paper. Although canvas allowed him to reproduce his father’s outward appearance precisely, it was difficult to convey inner elements such as his life, character, and spirit. Lee sensed a certain incongruity between a father in rural Korea and a Western canvas, and sought a solution in the rice sack as an object. Farmers plant and tend rice to produce the grain, then place it in sacks to convert it into economic value. In this process, rice is transformed from an agricultural crop into a commodity with commercial value. Lee gradually extended his interest from his father as an individual to family members and acquaintances, focusing on farmers who lived as his father did. They are the “people of Oji-ri.” Most of the portraits made in the mid-1980s were painted on vinyl sacks and present figures without backgrounds. From the late 1980s onward, Lee began using paper sacks, which have a relatively smooth surface. Cattle sometimes appear alongside the figures, with rice paddies and fields sometimes added to the background, gradually introducing a more narrative dimension. Lee soon expanded his perspective beyond the rural village of Oji-ri to the larger regional community of Seosan. He also approached rural life on a broader level, moving beyond personal history. Map of the Korea Peninsula (1984) offers a comprehensive view of contemporary society through figures from different social groups. They include the artist’s father, a farmer; Jeon Bong-jun, who led the Donghak Peasant Revolution of 1894; the Pope, whose visit marked the bicentennial of Catholicism in Korea; a military police officer symbolizing the divided nation; and a professional baseball player. Now in the Provinces (1984) draws on an article published in The JoongAng Ilbo dated June 18, 1984, about a rural bachelor who committed suicide because he was unable to marry. The incident shocked the public and drew attention to the severity of the crisis in rural communities. Earth-At Oziri(Oziri People) (1988) uses posters from the thirteenth presidential election as its background. At election time, politicians make countless promises to develop rural communities, but after the election, these promises often become empty echoes. 1991–1994: Dejected Anger of the Farmers In the 1990s, a “narrative tendency” to say more and a “metaphorical tendency” to imply more emerged simultaneously in Lee’s painting. In formal terms, his use of rice sacks declined as he turned to traditional painting materials such as jangji and hanji. Vinyl and paper sacks are objects that clearly reveal the conditions of their time; on the other hand, their printed words and logos can create a fixed and powerful impression of their own. Furthermore, Lee brought sickles, shovels, and hoes—which had previously appeared as secondary elements beside his figures—to the foreground of his works. The content of his work also changed. In the early 1990s, the Uruguay Round negotiations and the opening of the rice market hit rural Korea hard, leaving farmers’ lives even more impoverished than they had been in the 1980s. This rural reality was immediately reflected in his paintings: unlike the farmers in his earlier work, those painted during this period appear deeply despairing and grimly resolute. In Autumn in 1990 (1990), a foreign aircraft flies across a blue sky; below it, an elderly couple exhausted by labor rests listlessly. The vast power of capitalism, which forces the agricultural market open, is starkly contrasted with farmers collapsing helplessly before it. Late Autumn in a Flooded Area (1992) depicts land submerged underwater during the construction of Imha Dam in Andong, North Gyeongsang Province. A profound sense of powerlessness can be felt in the farmers who have abandoned the harvest and stare blankly at their former land, while their sorrow takes on particular significance through the sickles they hold. The meaning of farm tools such as sickles, shovels, and hoes also changed in Lee’s paintings. He had depicted farm tools with farmers since the 1980s, but they now appeared as independent motifs expressing farmers’ pent-up anger and resistance. A sickle is an everyday tool essential to farm work, but in times of oppression, it was also used by ordinary people to carve bamboo spears. Another important subject during this period was the ox. The ox represents the farmer and shares in the farmer’s hardships and joys. Lee personifies the ox to express the farmers’ range of emotions: an enraged ox conveys their fury, while a wounded ox conveys their pain. 1995–2000: Planting the Seed of Hope Lee’s artistic practice reached a turning point in the mid-1990s. The portraits he had painted over the previous decade almost disappeared, and objects such as soil, land, seeds, bowls, and shoes came to the fore. Where he had previously expressed farmers’ suffering and despair directly, during this period, he focused on the vitality of the earth and hope sprouting from it through images of soil and land. In other words, through a simplified, metaphorical language, he sought new possibilities for rural Korea and a positive source of strength. During this period, Lee introduced the dining table as a support for his paintings. Farmers ultimately work to produce rice. They cook the rice, set the table, and share a meal with the whole family. For farmers, the dining table is where the labor of producing rice meets the family as a community. Lee further identifies the table with the land. He paints the land on the tabletop and arranges various symbols within it. The fragments of bowls that frequently appear in these works signify the collapse of Korea’s agrarian culture and rural economy. Lee then painted shoes, seeds, and other objects realistically against the land. In Husband and Wife (1996), the earth is rendered so precisely that one can almost smell the soil. Two pairs of shoes rest on the ground. The couple who are the subjects of the painting have gone to work on the sacred, solemn land, leaving their rubber shoes behind. In Seed (1996), the various seeds in a bowl symbolize the productivity of the land and hope for life. Those seeds germinate in The Earth-Spring (1998): fresh green radish shoots emerge along the furrows, while at the center sits a bowl of life-giving water reflecting the blue sky. 2001–2005: Our Land, Our People After using a condensed and restrained mode of expression in the mid-to-late 1990s, Lee’s work became freer and more flexible in the 2000s. He did not abandon the rural issues he had consistently addressed, but began to view the Korean land and people from a broader perspective. He returned to the paintings of farmers he had suspended in the mid-1990s and also took an interest in larger themes such as the Baekdudaegan mountain range, the national territory, life, and the environment. As he used a wider range of materials, including hanji, plaster, printed matter, and sack paper, the scale of his works increased, he introduced three-dimensional and installation work for the first time. The Baekdudaegan series is a large-scale project devoted to painting the Korean land. After visiting the Amnok River, the Tuman River, and Mount Baekdu in 2000, Lee began painting the country’s mountains and rivers in earnest. Unlike a conventional landscape painting, Territory–From the Amnok River to the Tuman River (2002) is a “historical landscape” that encompasses human history, culture, ecology, and the environment; it can be described as a grand epic. At the upper right is the sunrise over the Tuman River, and beside it the majestic form of Cheonji, the crater lake of Mount Baekdu. Below, Onyeosanseong Fortress, where Goguryeo was founded, stands on the left, with the Gaema Plateau on the right. Between them, the winding Amnok River and twenty-one valleys unfold in a remarkable panorama. The installation series Hand of the Earth reflects on the sanctity of labor in modern industrial society. As society has become increasingly electronic and digital, human labor has shifted toward knowledge and information. Machines now perform tasks once done by hand, and people work primarily with their minds rather than their hands. Early agrarian society was a society of the hand. To reconsider the value of the hand, Lee made the farmer’s hand into a work of art and placed within it stones, nails, hoes, and shovels, preserving the course of life and the injuries endured by the hand. Still Painting the Countryside Lee Jonggu’s paintings have an accessible and familiar appeal. Their imagery is precise and meticulous, and they portray familiar types of people commonly seen around us. Their focus on rural life further adds to this familiarity. On closer inspection, however, the paintings are filled with content that cannot be passed over lightly: they intricately weave together the anguish, despair, frustration, anger, hope, and other emotions experienced by rural Korea over the years. Lee has addressed rural issues with greater consistency than almost any other artist. The twenty-first century has begun, but conditions in rural communities have not improved. Moreover, population decline is pushing them toward a dead end. Even in these desperate circumstances, Lee does not abandon hope for the future. Rice grains, seeds, green leaves, pasqueflowers, violets, new shoots, pine, and bamboo appear in his works as images of hope. Lee Jonggu will continue to accompany the Korean land and the people who live upon it. Embracing the artistic calling entrusted to him, he will follow this path for the rest of his life. *Source: Ryu Hanseung, "Artist of the Year 2005: Lee Jonggu," in Artist of the Year 2005: Lee Jonggu, exhibition catalogue (Seoul: Culture Books, 2005), 17-19. This text was revised in April 2026 based on the original.