Solo Exhibitions (Brief)

Lee Donggi held his first solo exhibition at Gallery On(Seoul, Korea) in 1993. In the same year, the Japanese animation character ‘Atom’ and the American animation character ‘Mickey Mouse’ were combined to create the character ‘Atomaus’ which captures popular culture and reality.

First announced in the group exhibition 《Remote Control》 held at Boda Gallery (Seoul, Korea) in 1994, Atomaus continues to appear as a main image of the work as a character of Korean pop art through a mixture of art genres and comics.

《Dongi Lee》 Solo Exhibition (2002, Kobayashi Gallery, Tokyo, Japan), 《Smoking》 (2006, One and J Gallery, Seoul, Korea), 《Bubble》 (2008, Willemkers Boom Gallery, Amsterdam, Netherland), 《Dongi Lee: Pentagon》 (2021, PIBI Gallery, Seoul, Korea), etc., and a series of ‘Soap Opera’ series (2012~), in which new characters such as A-Man, Box Robot, and Korean drama scenes were directed in addition to Atomaus showed off since the exhibition 《Double Vision》 held at Gallery 2(Seoul, Korea) in 2008, the abstract painting series has been steadily developing.

Group Exhibitions (Brief)

Participated in group exhibitions held at 《Everyday Life, Memory and History – 2nd Gwangju Biennale 》(1997, Gwangju City Museum, Gwangju, Korea), 《Media City Seoul 2000》(2000, Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea), 《Animate》(2005, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Fukuoka, Japan), 《Lead in Korea II 》(2009, With Space Gallery, Beijing, China), 《Permanded Soul》(2015, Waterfall Mansion, New York, USA), 《DMZ Art & Peace Platform》(2021, Inter-Korean Transit office Unimaru, Paju, Korea)

Awards (Selected)

He was nominated for the 2008 Sovereign Asia Art Prize (Sovereign Art Foundation, China).

Collections (Selected)

His works are in collections of various museums and companies such as the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Gwacheon, Korea), Seoul Museum of Art (Seoul, Korea), Kumho Museum of Art (Seoul, Korea), Wheelock Property (Hong Kong).

Originality & Identity

Lee Donggi explores the relationship between popular culture and art from the 1990s. Visual and philosophical elements are borrowed from images widely distributed in popular cultures, such as cartoons, dramas, advertisements, the internet, and subcultures, from various sources, including classical artworks, modernist paintings, and abstract art. Based on this, the paintings are completed by dismantling, transforming, mixing, overlapping, and reconstructing the imported images.

Lee Donggi is often called a first-generation Korean pop artist, the artist of Atomaus. It is not an incorrect review, but this title does not cover the various issue he puts into his work. Like Andy Warhol, in the 1960s, Lee Donggi sought to challenge the dichotomy between fine art and popular art from the beginning of the 1990s. And he became the first Korean artist to introduce a cartoon character to the front of fine artwork.

However, due to the graphic components and cartoon characters that stood out in his work, some viewers classified him simply as an ‘illustrator’ or a ‘cartoonist’. The artist ponders the ‘pop’ lacking in Korean contemporary art and completes his own synthesis by referring to the working languages of fine artists such as Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, and Gerhard Richer.

Lee Donggi’s work has now established itself as a significant image and keyword to describe Korean contemporary art, and he said, “I am only interested in ‘my own work’.” The eclectic work that has been going on for the past decade, and was shown in the 2016 exhibition 《Abyss》(Gallery 2, Seoul Korea), and the new work presented in exhibition 《Words》(2018, Gallary 2, Seoul, Korea). He never judges his work and bounds by any name. In this way, he moves forward with his own ‘observing’ and ‘drawing’.

Style & Contents

“I try not to ‘create’. I think my works are not entirely new but have historical images.
Those images will, of course, include works of art.”

The character ‘Atomaus’ and the related series ‘Bubble’ and ‘Smoking’ show his methodology as well. In the artist’s vast world of work, Atomaus continues to reproduce and transform infinitely in the space where he exists, including his facial expression and clothes.

Likewise, the artist Lee Donggi raises the question of ‘originality.’ Further, he critically captures the image of modern people who struggle between the reality of the times in which ideas, information, and language are plentiful and the clash of ‘tension’ and ‘balance’, ‘real’ and ‘fiction’.

Lee Donggi’s work includes various series, such as ‘Comics’(1988~ ), which cuts out a page from a cartoon and draws it into a canvas in enlargement. Moreover, ‘Soap Opera’, is illustrated by capturing scenes from Korean dramas introduced abroad. He is developing a series of various branches, such as the all-over ‘Abstract painting’(2018~ ) with expressionist elements and ‘Eclecticism’, which mixes words and images showing various dualities and abstract patterns. His eclectic art since 2010 deals entirely with hybridity and a mixture of conflict and layering. It becomes the core of his paintings.

This series shows three-dimensional aspects by combining pop culture, easily consumed by subcultures exhibiting its own characteristics, suggests an unreasonable system of meaning, and reveals today’s cultural phenomenon and cross-section of modern society. He is recently expanding the world of his work by introducing ‘Words’, an artwork that cultivates words extracted from literature, art, music, writer’s notes, and the internet and printed materials.

Topography & Continuity

The 1990s, when Lee Donggi started his artwork, was a period of cultural change in Korea. Public art was at the ebb, and postmodern discourse was ignited. A new interest in new media art began to rise.

Lee Donggi’s work, contemplating ‘pop’ after his debut, received attention during this trend. However, it was still regarded as an unfamiliar form in Korean art. Against this rejecting movement in Korea, the Japanese pop led by Takashi Murakami was sweeping the world.

In Korea, pop art and artists began to get full attention in the 2000s. As a result, the perspective of understanding pop art as a self (critical) confession of visual culture that exists in life and daily life has been established. It has spread to various fields such as movies and music. Lee Donggi was an artist at the centre of this trend in the Korean art world. The artworks of Lee Donggi, Kyoung Tack Hong, and Dong-Yu KIM were actively traded in overseas art auctions, and a pop-art boom started in Korea.

Lee Donggi is expanding his scope of activities with works with unique affinity and charm that neither popular culture nor fine art has. It seems that pop expands its reach within the public in a way previous art movements did not have.

Since participating in the exhibition 《Sonnenschein》(Karl-Stroble Gallery), held in Vienna, Austria, in 1991, the artist has steadily shown his artworks through galleries and art fairs in East Asia, America, and Europe, giving him an international reputation. Meanwhile, he creates a single album cover for J-hope (2021), a member of BTS, receiving wider public attention. Additionally, he collaborates with large companies to release art products.

His artwork world is no longer confined to ‘pop’ and presents new implications for Korean painting inside and outside his works.