[NewsCulture] Letters are traditionally meant to be read. For Lee Ungno and Kim Tschang-Yeul, however, Chinese characters became something far more expansive than language.
Brushstrokes carried the energy of bodily movement. Repeated characters generated visual order. Waterdrops suspended above the pages of the Thousand Character Classic became traces of contemplation and discipline. Both artists removed text from its conventional linguistic function and transformed it into a material element of painting.
The joint exhibition Lee Ungno & Kim Tschang-Yeul, organized by the Lee Ungno Museum and the Jeju Museum of Art Kim Tschang-Yeul, examines the formal experiments pursued by the two artists during their years in Paris as Korea and France commemorate 140 years of diplomatic ties.
Lee arrived in France in 1958. Kim entered the Paris art scene in 1969. While both shared deep roots in East Asian philosophy and calligraphic traditions, they ultimately developed markedly different visual vocabularies. Lee pushed the expressive potential and vitality of the brushstroke, while Kim cultivated a meditative world built on repetition, stillness and the slow accumulation of time through his iconic waterdrops.
At the center of the exhibition lies the concept of text itself.
From the 1950s onward, letters, signs and graphic symbols emerged as important formal devices in Western modern art. Experiments anticipated by artists such as Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Joan Miró evolved further after World War II through the materiality and physical gestures of Art Informel. Painting increasingly became a site where traces of action accumulated rather than a medium for storytelling. Letters, too, shifted from carriers of meaning to questions of line, rhythm, mark-making and structure.
Paris stood at the forefront of these transformations.
Artists including Jean Dubuffet, Georges Mathieu and Pierre Soulages each explored ways of transforming signs and gestures into independent visual languages. Within postwar European painting, text ceased to function merely as a communicative tool and instead became a foundational compositional element.
Both Lee and Kim approached Chinese characters through distinct artistic frameworks.
The two artists first gained national recognition after participating in the inaugural Contemporary Artists Invitational Exhibition organized by The Chosun Ilbo in 1957. Lee exhibited in the Korean painting section, while Kim participated as a Western-style painter.
Another major turning point came at the 1965 São Paulo Biennial. Lee received a silver medal for his early 문자추상 (character abstraction) work Composition, while Kim presented Ritual, a powerful work that preceded the development of his celebrated waterdrop series.
For Lee, Chinese characters entered a unique visual territory through processes of fragmentation and transformation. Ancient scripts, pictographic symbols and calligraphic strokes were broken apart and reconstructed into dynamic abstract forms. His Sequence Diagram of the Sixty-Four Hexagrams of the I Ching demonstrates how calligraphic energy migrates into abstraction. The symbols of the I Ching no longer function as systems of interpretation; instead, speed, ink density, repetition and empty space establish a visual order of their own.
For Kim, Chinese characters became inseparable from the disciplined structure underlying his waterdrop paintings.
Beginning with his Deconstruction series in the mid-1980s, Kim gradually dismantled the architecture of written language. In the later Recurrence series, pages of the Thousand Character Classic became organizing frameworks for the entire composition. The act of writing characters and painting waterdrops evolved into parallel forms of meditative repetition. Text and waterdrop alike embodied accumulated time, manual discipline and spiritual stillness.
The exhibition's second gallery, titled Field of Text, examines how characters generate structural order within the picture plane. Lee's I Ching and Composition series occupy the space through fragmented strokes and symbolic systems that create organic visual networks. Kim's Recurrence works establish a quieter rhythm through dense arrangements of characters and meticulously rendered waterdrops. Layers of repetition dissolve linguistic meaning while intensifying visual concentration.
The exhibition's third section, Traces of Practice, focuses on repetition, bodily movement and the passage of time.
Lee's celebrated Crowds series transforms calligraphic gestures into human figures. Each figure functions simultaneously as a person and as a variation of a brushstroke. Writing becomes movement. The direction of the brush expands into the collective energy of the crowd.
Kim's waterdrops move at an entirely different pace.
Where Lee's lines surge across the surface, Kim concentrates time into a single droplet. These works extend beyond trompe-l'oeil illusionism. Each waterdrop emerges from sustained repetition, concentration, breath and silence. For Kim, painting a droplet was inseparable from the repetitive discipline of writing characters. Both artists internalized the rhythm of text through the body, yet one translated that rhythm into movement and vitality while the other distilled it into stillness and contemplation.
The fourth gallery, Reconstructing Text, explores how language acquires physical presence beyond paper and canvas.
Lee expanded textual abstraction through newspapers, collage and sculptural materials. Printed text, once intended to convey information, becomes destabilized when intersected by gestural brushwork. The newspaper transforms from a reading surface into a layered visual field.
Kim likewise incorporated newspapers, maps and wooden surfaces already marked by systems of signs and information. In Waterdrops (Map of Hamheung), a geographical map ceases to function primarily as information. The addition of waterdrops shifts attention toward perception itself. Place names, printed symbols and cartographic lines become visual experiences rather than readable data.
The exhibition ultimately reveals a shared foundation and a profound divergence.
Paris, Chinese characters, East Asian philosophy, calligraphic tradition and the transformation of text into visual form connected the two artists. Yet their artistic destinations were fundamentally different. Lee dismantled language into movement, abstraction and collective vitality. Kim transformed repetition and waterdrops into a quiet order of contemplation.
One artist moves. The other gazes.
What began as language becomes line, rhythm, surface, material and discipline. Reading gives way to seeing. Through their hands, Chinese characters evolved into a distinctive visual language within modern Korean art, leaving powerful images precisely where words disappear.
Reported by News Culture M.J._mj94070777@nc.press
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