Like Trees,
Like People

When Lee Chul-soo held his first solo exhibition at Gwanhun Gallery in 1981, Korean society was living under military authoritarian rule and the aftershock of the May 18 Gwangju Uprising of 1980. The woodblock print had emerged, for a generation of young artists, as the medium closest to the street: cheap to reproduce, durable, capable of being pressed onto cheap paper and handed directly to people. Lee was counted — alongside Oh Yun — as one of that generation's defining minjung printmakers.

What distinguished Lee's 1980s work was not spectacle but intimacy. Even in his most politically engaged period, the imagery tended toward the human figure in its ordinary postures: bent at labour, resting, reaching. The woodblock, for Lee, was never merely a political instrument — it was already a practice of paying attention, of looking carefully enough at a person or a tree or a gesture that it became worth cutting into wood.

By 1989 his work was traveling internationally. Solo exhibitions in Germany and Switzerland, and an invitation from the Original Print Gallery in Dublin, Ireland, signaled that the formal economy of the Korean minjung woodblock had a legibility beyond the peninsula — that a single cut, a single phrase, could cross language.

In 1987 Lee Chul-soo left Seoul and moved to Baekun-myeon, Jecheon — a small township in the mountains of North Chungcheong province — to farm alongside his wife. It was not a retreat from art but a redefinition of the conditions under which art could be made honestly.

From around 1988, the work shifted. Overt social critique gave way to self-reflection, to the daily rhythms of rural life, to what he has called the practice of ordinary days as contemplation. The images grew quieter: a mushroom after rain, the angle of a branch in winter, the weight of a bowl. The accompanying phrases grew shorter. He has described his prints of this period as “daily confession and self-examination” — the blade as a tool for honesty rather than argument.

The farm did not separate Lee from society; it relocated the terms of the encounter. Living outside the art-world economy of Seoul, growing food, cutting blocks in the same hours, he arrived at a practice that was both deeply rooted and surprisingly portable. Over four decades the Jecheon studio has produced thousands of woodblock prints — and a body of work that has found its way into more Korean homes than almost any other living artist.

For most Koreans, the first encounter with Lee Chul-soo's work did not happen in a gallery. It happened on a kitchen wall — in the square of a print calendar — or in the palm of a hand holding a postcard. This is not accident. It reflects a conscious strategy, developed across decades, of placing the work where people already are.

The annual Lee Chul-soo print calendar, published continuously since at least the early 2000s, has become one of the longest-running artist-calendar traditions in Korean publishing. Each year a new set of woodblock prints structures the months, bringing seasonal imagery and a short phrase into hundreds of thousands of homes. In 2002 he launched the online “Leaf Letters” (나뭇잎편지) community — a digital extension of the postcard tradition — which grew to over 60,000 members, each receiving a print image and text directly into their daily life.

The effect has been to make Lee Chul-soo the most distributed artist in Korean everyday life — not through institutional acquisition but through the postal system, the bookshop, and the screen. His official shop mokpan.com continues this logic: original works available directly, without gallery mediation.