Lehmann Maupin Seoul is pleased to present an exhibition of work by Chang Ucchin, Lee Ungno, and Suh Se Ok, three pivotal masters in modern Korean art who redefined the relationship between the individual and the collective through distinct yet intersecting visual languages. The exhibition title reflects a shared concern in their practices: while each artist approaches the human figure as a singular presence, their works extend beyond the individual to consider humanity as a whole. Working across ink and oil, figuration and abstraction, they treated the brush as a structural instrument, organizing line, mass, and interval into rhythmic compositions that articulate how figures gather, disperse, and inhabit shared space.

Emerging from different artistic formations and historical circumstances, each artist engaged tradition in distinct ways. Lee and Suh approach the legacy of East Asian ink painting and calligraphy as a foundational visual framework to be expanded, abstracted, and reoriented toward modern concerns. Meanwhile, Chang—working primarily in oil and intermittently in ink—did not explicitly align himself with a continuous literati lineage. Instead, his work distills visual form to an elemental clarity that parallels ink aesthetics without claiming its inheritance. In each case, tradition becomes neither static nor purely referential, but a flexible structure through which the conditions of modern life and shared existence are examined.