일초 이철주(逸初 李澈周, 1941- )의 한국화

Abstract

Lee, Cheoljoo, an artist who specializes in Korean painting, graduated from the Seoul National University’s College of Fine Arts with a major in Oriental Painting. He won two Minister of Culture and Communications prizes in the National Art Exhibition of the Republic of Korea, the largest art exhibition in Korea at that time, and eventually turned to teaching. From mid-1960s to late 1980s, Lee worked on creating a precise replication of a portrait or a landscape initially, and then expressed the replication using new techniques. His works were drawn from a wide range of subjects, from master artisans or artists of traditional culture, to the difficult lives of the common people and the development of the urban landscape. Lee’s work underwent a significant change from the actual contemporary world in the early 1990s, as he turned to nonfigurative art, exploring a world of imagination—space. The paintings produced during this period are abstract pieces based on a sequence of characters formed from the strokes, which feature constructions of all-over patterns or recombinations of cells made from identical polygons. His Microcosmos series, for instance, divides the rectangular screen and places objects in the center of the rectangle. Such visuals express Lee’s new order and cosmology. Lee continues to work with powerful and abstract imagery, using only the ink and excluding all colors except black and white. Lee, Cheoljoo who emphasized the importance of “stroke” (劃) in a painting, has mastered all techniques of construction possible from the trinity of paper, ink, and brush, from portrait and urban landscape to abstract pieces. Thus, his pieces represent the question on the need to preserve tradition, and the search for the changing techniques and artistic trends of the present time that are essential in the field of modern Korean painting.