Ungno Lee

Break a Chinese character apart and the meaning drops away, leaving only gesture. Lee Ung-No's letter abstractions carried the brushwork of calligraphy to exactly that point. Late in life he moved to people. In the Crowd series he repeated small figures by the hundred and the thousand; each is only a few strokes, but together they move like water, and from a distance they become a crowd in a square. He was imprisoned after the 1967 East Berlin incident and settled in Paris afterwards. Even in prison he kept working, with grains of rice and scraps of paper. He died in Paris in 1989.