Korea's first independent filmmaker. A total artist who carried Gwangju, LA, and the divided peninsula on his body. Remembering Lee Iktae, who passed in winter 2025, through the three works he left behind.
Lee Iktae (李益太, 1947–2025) passed away on December 7, 2025. SAF 2026 became one of the final acts of solidarity he consented to during his lifetime.
Over fifty years. Film, theater, performance, painting, installation, photography — Lee Iktae's practice was a ceaseless dismantling of genre boundaries. To him, art was not an end but "a way of being in relationship with the world," a means of practicing solidarity with those who suffer.
1970, Korea's First Independent Film
In 1970, at twenty-three, the young Lee Iktae — then a student at Seoul Institute of the Arts — acted in, directed, and produced Korea's first independent film, Between Morning and Evening. The work, which thoroughly dismantled the conventional dramatic grammar of beginning-middle-end, was later screened at Tate Modern in the UK.
Around the same time, he founded the experimental film group "Film 70." In the mid-1970s, together with Bang Taesu and Kim Kulim, he organized "The Fourth Group," Korea's first avant-garde art collective. To leave the canvas behind and use living, moving "action" as a medium, pulling art into the everyday square — that was his starting point.
1977–1999, Twenty-Two Years in LA
In 1977, the artist crossed to the US and stayed for twenty-two years. He won first prize at the international exhibition of the Clary Miner Gallery in New York State, entering the international stage, and at the same time lived in LA's Koreatown, documenting the everyday lives and social issues of immigrants as a freelance journalist. This experience planted in his work a critical lens on "Korean diaspora" and "fake American dream."
