Lee Seung-Jio (1941-1990) made his debut as an artist in 1964 when the Origin Group was established. The Origin was an organization consisting of Western-style painters who graduated from Hongik University in 1964. The struggle to overcome abstract expressionism culminated in the joint exhibition of young painters in 1967, and it was through this that Lee revealed his distinctiveness.

Three groups - Mudongin, Origin and Sinjeondongin - participated in this exhibition. While artists of Mudongin and Shinjeondongin submitted many works with strong tendency of Neo-Dada or Nouveau Réalisme, painters of the Origin had a unified mood with geometric abstraction.

Even in the unified geometric tendency of the Origin, Lee's method distinguished itself from others as he tended toward optical art, escaping the flat structure that was the geometric tendency of the time.

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“I was on a train trip. While I closed my eyes and contemplated for a moment, something passed through my retinas in a flash. I suddenly opened my eyes. But there was nothing. It was like the inability to forget a person who made a strong first impression. As soon as I arrived home, I stayed up for two nights straight and manipulated the image that remained in my mind, completing today’s pipe-like painting.” – Lee Seung Jio

Lee Seung Jio studied in the Department of Western Painting at Hongik University in Seoul before going on to found the Origin Group in 1962 alongside his contemporaries Suh Seung-Won and Choi Myoung-Young. Unlike the Dansaekhwa artists who were grouped together only decades later by curators, the Origin painters––slightly younger than the Dansaekhwa artists––exhibited together from the movement’s onset, rallying around a commitment to rebel against national disorder and tumult through cool, unemotional abstraction. The Origin painters embraced the traditionally Western media of oil painting, perfecting their own practices and imbuing their paintings with a stark sense of duality between volume and flatness. The stark lines and hard edges of these works emerged in response to the decidedly more heated and emotional Korean Art Informel movement as a means of exploring how painting could become a more authentically Korean medium. Repetition and refinement functioned as the common threads throughout the works by these painters. Lee Seung Jio distinguished himself from his fellow Origin painters, garnering critical attention as his style matured and the other members began gaining repute internationally.

In 1968, Lee was awarded the Grand Prize at the Dong-A International Fine Art Exhibition and participated in the Korea National Art Exhibition. That same year, Park Seo-Bo referred to Lee as “a future giant of Korean painting.” His work received awards at the National Exhibition four consecutive years, from 1968 through 1971. In both 1968 and 1970, Lee was bestowed the Minister of Culture and Information Prize. In 1971, Lee exhibited outside of Korea for the first time at the São Paolo Biennale. After his passing in 1990, Lee’s retrospective exhibitions were held in Ho-Am Art Museum, Korea (1991), Total Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea (1996), and Busan Museum of Art (2000). Most recently the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea held a major retrospective showcasing more than 120 paintings from many different collections. Lee’s works are in the permanent collections of the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea; Hoam Museum, Korea; Seoul Museum of Art, Korea; Hong-Ik University Museum, Korea; Total Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea; and Walker-Hill Art Museum, Korea.