'Nothing Here Makes You Sad': Lee Dai-won story rewritten

Lee Dai-won's "The Wall (Secret Garden)" (1986), an oil painting stretching 5 meters in length is on display at the artist's retrospective exhibition "Nothing Here Makes You Sad" at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea Deoksugung in Seoul, Wednesday. Newsis

The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA) is inviting visitors to look past the easy label of “the happiest painter in the world” with a major new retrospective of the work of Lee Dai-won (1921-2005) at MMCA Deoksugung.

“Lee Daiwon: Nothing Here Makes You Sad” is the first large-scale museum survey of the artist's work, bringing together 122 paintings and about 100 archival items together with antiques and other items that shaped his visual language.

The title borrows an observation by Lee's close friend, art historian Kim Won-ryong, who once wrote that Lee’s painting contains “nothing that makes one sad.”

MMCA curator Bae Won-jung said she chose the line because “it most plainly and honestly sums up the world his paintings build — not because his life is without pain, but because he insisted on transforming that pain into color and light.”

Organized in four chronological sections, the show traces roughly 70 years of Lee’s practice, from a 1933 still life painted at age 12 to monumental landscapes stretching up to seven meters across.

Lee Dai-won's photo, Korean traditional craft collection and paintings are on display at the artist's retrospective exhibition "Nothing Here Makes You Sad" at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea Deoksugung in Seoul, Wednesday. Newsis

Beyond 'the happiest painter'

Lee, who died in 2005, has long been remembered by the public as a cheerful landscape painter of glowing orchards and mountains, nicknamed “the magician of color” and “the happiest painter in the world.” Bae stressed that the exhibition aims to dismantle the idea that his bright palette was simply an expression of temperament.

“Behind that happiness was a very rigorous, lifelong formal experiment,” she said during a press preview, Wednesday. “He completed his own narrative not through dramatic biographical episodes but through the changes and achievements within painting itself.”

The exhibition shows how Lee, who studied law and worked in business before turning to art full time, carried memories of wartime conscription, family loss and institutional responsibilities as a dean and university president.

“There is no artist without hardship or loneliness,” Bae said. “What makes Lee unusual is that, week after week, he went up to his farm in Paju, sat with the seasons and turned that complicated life into fields of color instead of tragedy.”

Lee Dai-won's Korean traditional craft collection and paintings are on display at the artist's retrospective exhibition "Nothing Here Makes You Sad" at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA) Deoksugung in Seoul. Courtesy of MMCA

Color, craft and Korean modernity

Rather than chasing Western art trends, Lee translated the surface and light of Korean traditional crafts like embroidery, mother-of-pearl inlay and Korean ink painting into the language of oil painting.

Bae pointed out that his signature dotted and striped strokes borrow from the way colored threats sit side by side in embroidery: “When you look closely, his reds and greens don’t blend into mud. Like the threads, they stay distinct, vibrating next to each other.”

Lee’s clustered dots and shimmering color fields draw directly on the surface logic of traditional mother-of-pearl inlay so that individual hues catch and reflect light without ever blending away, Bae explained.

Lee Dai-won's "Farm" (1987) / Courtesy of MMCA

The show also highlights his role as a public intellectual. He founded and ran Bando Gallery, regarded as Korea’s first sustained commercial gallery; introduced Korean artists to global stage; led Hongik University’s College of Fine Arts; and translating key texts on Korean aesthetics, while also serving as president of the National Academy of Arts and as a cultural ambassador for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

“He was not only a painter of orchards but a partner in building the very ecosystem of Korean modern art,” Bae explained.

The foreign ministry holds a significant number of Lee’s large-scale landscape paintings in its collection, many of which hang in Korean embassies and missions abroad, where foreign visitors often encounter his work as a visual introduction of Korea.

Lee Dai-won's large-scale landscape paintings are on display at the artist's retrospective "Nothing Here Makes You Sad" at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA) Deoksugung in Seoul. Courtesy of MMCA

The museum noted that there is a growing popular interest in Lee’s paintings, pointing out that three works on view in the show come from the personal collection of BTS member RM, an avid collector of contemporary Korean art.

For Bae, Lee’s work speaks urgently to a moment in which “Korean-ness” in art is often reduced to motifs.

“Artists in the 1960s and 70s were obsessed with finding Korean identity,” she said. “Lee showed that identity is not a motif but a way of handling color, line and surface, drawn from our crafts and painting traditions and made new. That’s why it is timely to reconsider him now.”

The exhibition runs from Thursday to Nov. 8 at MMCA Deoksugung.