One artist who erased
the borders between genres

In 1970, while studying at Seoul Institute of the Arts, Lee Iktae directed, wrote, and starred in Between Morning and Evening— now recognized as Korea's first independent film. Shot on 16mm in black and white, the twenty-minute work deliberately dismantled the conventional grammar of film narrative: no rising action, no resolution, no coherent cause and effect. The film follows a young man across a day and its encounters, but its logic is associative, not dramatic. It was a formal provocation at a moment when Korean cinema was largely governed by genre conventions and studio control.

In the same year Lee joined The Fourth Group — one of Korea's earliest avant-garde collectives, which united visual artists and filmmakers in challenging the established art world through happenings and experimental action. He also co-founded Film 70, and in 1972 helped form the Moving Image Research Forum, a group of university students and filmmakers engaged in systematic study of French New Wave and New American Cinema. The accumulation of these affiliations in a single year describes a particular moment: Korean art in 1970 was opening outward, and Lee was among those doing the opening.

The long reach of Between Morning and Evening is itself evidence of his place in Korean experimental art history. The film was screened at the 27th Korean Independent Short Film Festival (2001), at the 30th Seoul Independent Film Festival (2004), and — most significantly — at Tate Modern in London in 2015, as part of the exhibition Embeddedness: Artist Films and Videos from Korea 1960s to Now. A work made by a student in 1970 reaching a London museum in 2015: the delay, and the arrival, are both part of what it means to be a pioneer.

When Lee Iktae moved to the United States in 1977, he came to paint. But the Korean diaspora community he found himself in — and the history that followed it there — could not be addressed in paint alone. In Los Angeles he founded Theater 1981, a performance group built around sound and visual language, to confront historical trauma through collective physical action.

The Wailing series commemorated the victims of the Gwangju Democracy Movement — the 1980 pro-democracy uprising suppressed by military force, whose casualties were a wound carried by the Korean diaspora in Los Angeles as much as by those who remained at home. The performances were experimental in method but direct in intent: to enact mourning in public, to refuse the privatization of grief. They were reported in specialized art publications and mainstream press alike. The performance Spirit 265, commemorating the 269 people killed when a Soviet fighter jet shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007 in September 1983, was treated as a top news story by ABC and other major broadcasters — a measure of the depth of community response it touched.

After the 1992 Los Angeles riots, which devastated Koreatown, Lee's response was again to bring the destroyed world physically into art space: charred debris, shattered bottles, melted household objects transported directly into the gallery. Volcano Island, created with funding from the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department and broadcast on NBC, did not only display wreckage — it also laid earth on top of the ruins and planted seeds. The work held both grief and the possibility of recovery in the same space. Lee continued to receive L.A. Cultural Affairs grants forHugging Angels and The Day of Collage. He also collaborated during this period with the California Expressionist artist GRONK. In all of this, performance was not a form chosen for its own sake but because some moments demand witness in the body, not just the eye.

After returning to Korea in 1999 and completing the Ice Wall series — its 380 yellow ice blocks on two Seoul bridges, its silent prayer for the dissolution of division — Lee Iktae turned toward a quieter territory. In the mid-2000s, living outside the city, he developed what he called the Haiku (Aiku) series: works made by spreading hanji in the yard, pouring pigment, washing it away with water, drying it in the sun, then beginning again. Wind scattered leaves across the surface. Bees and butterflies and dragonflies landed and moved on. The work was completed not by the artist alone but by everything present — a feast made by wind, water, air, insects, and leaves.

In his own account of the shift: “For a long time I struggled to express the heavy burden of meaning, symbol, and message. When I abandoned form, meaning, and symbol, my heart became lighter.” The Haiku series developed alongside ink paintings that reached for a similar condition — the work that paints itself, the work that does not carry the artist's intention as a load. He described his artist's identity as that of “a translator of the invisible world”: someone who does not impose vision but opens a channel.

The Pierrot series, which occupied his final years, turned this inward. The clown — a figure of wit and pathos simultaneously — became the vehicle for exploring the double nature of every person: grief behind laughter, sincerity inside performance. Painted on hanji with acrylic and oil pastel, the works hold together bright primary color and emotional weight, smeared and pressed texture, the comedy and the sorrow that cannot be separated. “We are all clowns who have appeared on the stage of the world,” he said. The advice he gave to younger artists — “tell your own story rather than seeking fame” — belonged to the same understanding: that art is not a destination but a relationship, a form of being present to what is actually there.