Hakgojae Gallery cordially invites you to Lee Dongyoub’s solo exhibition from 17th of July to 30th of August, 2015. Twenty artworks that were personally given to Hakgojae Gallery during artist’s lifetime will be on view, making this exhibition particularly more meaningful. Lee Dongyoub is considered to be one of the most critical artists who founded Korean abstract painting movement, Dansaekhwa. The artist is also known to be a favorite student of Lee Ufan, and had participated in a group show entitled Five Korean Artists, Five Kinds of White at Tokyo Gallery in May 1975, in which often credited as an exhibition where it introduced Dansaekhwa for the first time to the public.  

Since the 1970s, Lee Dongyoub created white surfaced monochrome paintings for over fifty years until his death in 2013. For Lee, the color white, is a void for consciousness and a vessel for thought. In the 1980s, the artist began to show his Between series in which he used wide brushes that were usually used in oriental paintings creating wide white brushstrokes on white backgrounds. Lee repeated countless brushstrokes to exclude materiality and realize spirituality like a truth-seeker.  

Lee Dongyoub left his achievements in Korean modern art history by participating in numerous significant exhibitions including the first Independants Exhibition. His artworks are now part of prestigious public collections at Tokyo National Museum of Modern Art (Tokyo, Japan), National Museum of Contemporary Art (Gwacheon, Korea), and Ho-Am Art Museum (Yong-in, Korea), and many more. Lee is receiving global attention, he was stated to be a significant artist in an article entitled “Beyond White: Reading Tansaekhwa Today” by an art critic, Robert Liles, published in ArtAsiaPacific magazine in 2014.