Informed by an ongoing reappraisal of the Modern art canon, an increasing number of galleries are presenting pioneers of the period who come from a plurality of histories. The Euro-American understanding of Modernism is increasingly being challenged, and this is particularly visible in some of the presentations planned for the Insights sector at the 2022 edition of Art Basel Hong Kong.

Exhibited in this year’s edition, are three Asian avant-garde artists – Lee Ungno (1904–1989), Alfonso Ossorio (1916–1990), and Yuki Katsura (1913–1991) – who invite us to consider Modernism not as a linear and monolithic block, but as a set of divergent and individualized responses to a reality in flux. Originating from Korea, the Philippines, and Japan respectively, each of their lives embodies the intersections and transnational legacies that define so many art historical practices by straddling eras, worlds, and traditions.

Gallery Vazieux’s survey of works by Lee Ungno dating from the 1960s to the 1980s presents an artist who, in his long career spanning most of the 20th century, shifted in his use of ink between abstraction and figuration and constantly reinvented it as a modern medium. Lee grew up in Korea under Japanese colonial rule. He was first trained in Chinese calligraphy and traditional Korean painting before studying Nihonga – a style of 20th century Japanese painting that stayed true to traditional conventions – as well as Western-style art at a Modern art academy in Tokyo. His mastering of calligraphic strokes coincided with the Postwar era, when Western avant-garde artists looked toward Asian traditions to draw inspiration for improvisatory methodologies and gestural techniques.

After settling down in Paris in the early 1960s, Lee established friendships with artists and intellectuals associated with Art Informel and Abstract Expressionism. During this period, his semi-abstract style, with its ink wash and calligraphic influences, diverged significantly from the abstractions of Western artists and was instead firmly rooted in Asian sensibilities. 

While in Paris, Lee founded the Académie de Peinture Orientale de Paris where he guided European artists to explore their inner existence through gestures, alphabetic signs, and Chinese ink. Partly inspired by him, Pierre Soulages, Hans Hartung, Mark Tobey, and Henri Michaux – whose works from the 1970s and 1980s will be presented at Art Basel Hong Kong by Jahn und Jahn – created calligraphic abstractions that captured internal upheavals using the fluidity of ink. Likewise, Lee’s own work shifted towards abstract calligraphies with stylized anthropomorphic figures, which eventually became the main subject of his series begun in 1967, ‘People’. These forms constituted almost his entire production in the 1980s, when they came to symbolize political energy and democratic hope following the violent suppression of the Gwangju democratic uprising in South Korea.

Lee’s career highlights the parallel and entangled Modernisms that exist throughout art history and which expand artistic borders. An examination of his practice disrupts the notion that Asian Modern art pioneers were not driven by blind imitation, but rather by avant-garde experiments based on dynamic dialogues and exchanges with their counterparts in major Modern art movements across the world. Lee was by no means a follower of artistic trends in European abstraction; rather, he was a bold experimenter who sought to revolutionize the language of Western avant-garde art. 

Likewise, Galería Cayón foregrounds the multi-directional flow of influence that continues to the present day through its presentation of works by Alfonso Ossorio. Born in the Philippines, into a Spanish-Chinese family of vast fortune, amassed through the sugar trade, Ossorio had a privileged upbringing and studied art at Harvard University. Becoming a patron of Jackson Pollock in the mid-1950s gave him unique access to the vibrant New York art scene. Together with Pollock and Jean Dubuffet, Ossorio sought to create an innovative pictorial language through unorthodox materials and techniques.

Amid this scene, Ossorio was rather an unusual figure, being exorbitantly rich, of mixed heritage, ambiguous religion, and homosexual (or bisexual). His exploration of a new type of visual language was imbued with a fascination for religious imagery and an acute attention to the everyday. He blended religious symbolism with an intuitive, lush, cryptic, and painterly abstraction while inserting found objects into the impasto layers of paint. Ossorio is also known for his ‘Congregations’ – assemblages of fantastic found objects – which he began in the late 1950s. These works are a sublime celebration of the diversity of the artist’s generation and of the hopeful promise it contained. Yet although the creative dialogue between Ossorio, Pollock, and Dubuffet could bring nuanced narratives to the conventional art history of the Postwar avant-garde, his name and oeuvre have remained largely absent from the canon until recently.

As a woman artist, Yuki Katsura was denied creative agency from the start of her career. Nukaga Gallery seeks to correct this injustice by presenting her work alongside Atsuko Tanaka, a fellow woman artist who was at the forefront of the Japanese avant-garde. During her long career that straddled the pre- and Postwar eras, Katsura constantly maneuvered her way through the patriarchal institutions of art. One of the pillars of her early practice was a lyrical, non-figurative collage based on found objects. Being influenced by French Surrealism, Neo-Dada, and Abstract Expressionism, Katsura’s style of abstract collage was principally derived from a pursuit of unique tactile sensations and a fascination with the texture of materials. The sensual tactility and gestural nature of collage, evoking a physical and emotive experience of the world, was her means of expressing a female subjectivity without resorting to a clichéd iconography of the feminine.

Artists, such as Lee Ungno, Yuki Katsura, and Alfonso Ossorio, actively traversed cultures and disrupted boundaries during their lifetimes. Their artistic singularities not only affirm the multiplicity of Modernisms produced around the world, but also bring forward new understandings of the complex Modern conditions that engendered their artistic trajectories. The nuances and variations revealed in their works serve as a proposition, even a provocation, to reframe conceptions of art as parallel yet entangled. It is by celebrating the lives and works of artists like them that we can begin to move beyond the single grand narrative of art history and re-envision a Modern art canon that embraces diversity.

Mia Yu is an art historian, curator, and author based in Beijing.

Captions for full-bleed images: 1. Yuki Katsura, Fallen Leaves Composition (detail), 1938. Copyright the artist. 2. Alfonso Ossorio, Illness and Recovery (The Portrait of Robert) (detail), 1942. Courtesy of Galería Cayón, Madrid. 3. Yuki Katsura, Afternoon (detail). Courtesy of Gallery Nukaga, Tokyo. © Yuki Katsura.