Lee Jung-Seob

The ox is starved to the bone, yet braced as if to charge. That tension is what Lee Jung-Seob held onto all his life, pressing the animal's force into the canvas with a few fast, coarse lines. After the Korean War separated him from his family he drifted between Busan, Tongyeong and Seogwipo. Without paint or paper he scratched images into cigarette foil with a nail, and drew across the letters he sent to his wife and two sons in Japan. The foil pictures began in poverty and became his most private work. White Ox and Family Setting Out survive. He died alone in a Seoul hospital in 1956, aged forty.