On May, 1962, Lee Ungno held his first solo exhibition in Paris at Galerie Paul Facchetti, presenting a series of 15 collage works. Early in his Paris years, he dedicated himself to paper collages made by cutting and pasting newspapers and magazines, then adding color. This exhibition, titled Ung-No Lee, Collages, highlighted collages as a key artistic achievement representing Lee’s modernity and experimental spirit.

Picasso and Braque first introduced collage in Cubism to create depth on flat surfaces. Beyond this, collage was used to blur the boundaries between reality and art, express the fragmented sensations of modern life, and challenge artistic authority. Lee partly drew on this tradition but focused more on the pure visual effects of texture and color. Between 1960 and 1962, he layered paper densely, sometimes tearing colored prints or applying ink to traditional Korean paper, creating thick surfaces similar to the hautes pâtes technique in French Art Informel. Lee combined Western abstract language with Korean identity, using traditional materials like brush, ink, and hanji to add tonal variations and ink-wash aesthetics, merging Western methods with Korean sensibility. After 1963, his works gradually incorporated letter forms, moving toward lyrical and textual abstraction.

This exhibition centers on Lee’s early 1960s collage works as the foundation of his abstract practice and traces his experimentation through the 1970s. It also situates Lee’s collage within international movements such as Art Informel, Abstract Expressionism, lyrical abstraction, and Support-Surface, exploring his role in mid-20th-century Paris and New York abstraction. Through his collage series, the exhibition seeks to understand Lee Ungno’s position in the global art scene.