"A Major Korean Painter Begins to Get His Due," The New York Times online, by John Yau, March 7, 2020

While postwar Korean artists are celebrated in the West, the strongest painters of the next generation remain under-known.

This is a statement that the Korean abstract artist, Lee Seung Jio (1941-1990), made in 1971, a few years after he gained attention in Korea for his cooly geometric abstract paintings of cylindrical forms:

Some call me “Pipe Painter.” I neither welcome nor dislike the distinction. The nickname might be a reference to the illusionistic objecthood created by the repetition without the premise of the motif based on a specific subject. Of course, the pipes are not conjured as a symbol of modern c...