Two Exiled Painters Find Solace in the Sun and Space
Creatrip Team
2 months ago
A Seoul show, “Meeting the Sun,” pairs works by Lee Seung-ja (1918–2009) from Jinju and Lebanese-born Etel Adnan (1925–2021). Both women began painting later in life after forced or chosen exile: Lee left Korea for Paris in 1951 as a divorced mother and developed layered abstract canvases suggesting landscapes and later cosmic motifs; Adnan, a poet and refugee from wartime Lebanon, studied in Paris and the U.S., began painting in California and used bright colors, circles and horizon bands evoking sun, moon and places like Mount Tamalpais. The exhibition (White Cube Seoul, free until March 7) highlights their shared responses to mid-20th-century Parisian culture and the era’s space-age optimism, showing how two different lives converged in luminous, abstract work. (taepyung/태평?)
