At Tina Kim Gallery, “Lee Seung Jio: Nucleus in Resonance,” which runs through November 8, 2025, surveys the artist’s defining “Nucleus” series, pursued from the late 1960s until his death in 1990. For Lee, the “nucleus” was not a symbol so much as a perceptual engine—a point where energy, rhythm, and seeing coalesce. “I began this after the Apollo spacecraft opened my eyes to the spatiality of the universe,” he reflected, framing his motif within the Space Age’s expanded horizons.
The exhibition positions Lee within a charged triangulation of influences and conditions. Internationally, geometric abstraction and Op Art surged as post–Art Informel alternatives—GRAV’s celebrated “Labyrinth” at the 1963 Paris Biennale, Bridget Riley and Victor Vasarely’s mid-’60s prominence, Julio Le Parc’s 1966 Venice win. At home, South Korea’s rapid industrialization retooled the visual field; globally, the Cold War refracted technology’s double image as utopian development and existential threat. Lee absorbed these currents but transformed them, forging a dialectical, not derivative, conversation with Western modernism through a distinctly Korean lens.
A concise arc of works orchestrates that argument. Nucleus 10 (1968)—first shown at the 12th Contemporary Art Exhibition at Gyeongbokgung Palace Museum—announces the tubular motif that would anchor his practice. In canvases of the early 1970s, such as Nucleus 74-9 (1968–1974), the cylinder becomes an organizing framework, its optical heft achieved by loading a flat brush with light and dark tones and then sanding the surface to a burnished, metallic density. The result is an irresolvable oscillation: pipes that are both two-dimensional planes and three-dimensional forms, images that expose perception’s own illusions.
Lee’s career also helped scaffold Korea’s avant-garde infrastructure while he maintained aesthetic autonomy. A co-founder of ORIGIN (1962–), advocating a return to formal purity, and a key member of AG (1969–1975), which fused theory and practice, he was central to experimental circles. Yet he remained stylistically singular: resisting Dansaekhwa’s material procedures and conceptual art’s medium expansion, he sustained a rare “mechanical aesthetic” in Korean abstraction, extending it through the 1980s in rigorously structured, contemplative fields.
Recent institutional attention has underscored his importance to a fuller map of Korean postwar abstraction. From “Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s–1970s” (MMCA/Guggenheim, 2023–2024) to MMCA’s surveys of geometric abstraction, Lee’s work is increasingly read as prescient: an alternative genealogy rooted in optical inquiry and the visual language of industrial modernity.
The exhibition culminates in the first U.S. presentation of Lee’s black paintings—Nucleus 78-23, 78-24, 78-25, and 78-26 (all 1978)—installed together in the back second gallery. For Lee, black was a ground of silence and reduction, a place where image and being converge; these works condense decades of experimentation into a meditative, process-driven register.
