1. Introduction — The Exhibition and the Artist
Here is a painter.
In black horn-rimmed glasses and a white dress shirt, he went down every weekend to a farm in Paju. There, without even a chair, he would drop down onto the bare earth and paint the same landscape — for thirty years, without fail. His name was Lee Daiwon, and he is the subject of today's exhibition. The world called him the happiest painter alive, the most fortunate of artists. Born into comfort, he studied law at Keijo Imperial University. He went on to become the inaugural dean of the College of Fine Arts at Hongik University, the first painter ever to serve as a university president, the manager of a commercial gallery, and chairman of the National Academy of Arts.
Unlike the immortal painters who lived in hardship without selling a single work, he became famous early. His paintings reached the walls of private collectors' homes long before they reached museum storerooms. It looks like a life that lacked for nothing. And the bright, luminous surfaces seem to reflect exactly that life.
But doesn't it make you wonder?
No one lives in light alone. So where did his darkness go? The trees and wildflowers, the wind and the water he loved so much — they throw off shadow as brilliantly as they catch light. Why did he filter out only the light, and let only that reach the canvas? And why are there no people in those landscapes? This exhibition sets out to find the answers inside the paintings Lee Daiwon left behind. Where he drew that radiance from, and how he layered it, again and again, over darkness until it bloomed into a luminous surface — that is the story we are about to enter.
