Lee Dai-Won is an exceptional painter in Korean Modern Art history, an unprecedented example of a self-taught artist who achieved phenomenal success both artistically and commercially. The distance he maintained from a structured institutional education gave him the boldness and liberty to remain a figurative painter of trees and mountains, while most of his colleagues abandoned the figurative for abstraction. While he remained within a representational idiom, he was nonetheless an innovator, always exploring new techniques and skills. It was during the 1950s that, deeply inspired by the beauty of sinuous lines and simplified brushstrokes , after graduating from law school, he fully devoted himself to the practice and study of the technical skills and aesthetic spirit of Asian painting,. Through persistent practices and experiments, by the 1960s, Lee developed his signature style of pointillism, as evident in Pukhan Mountain (Lot 2182). Most of Lee's paintings from this period are included in the permanent collections of the noted private and public institutions, and it is very rare to find such a fine example on the public market.
Pukhan Mountain displays Lee's unique technique of expressing light by combining points and short lines. Although his brushstrokes appear to be drawn from Western Impressionism, especially those of Georges Seurat's pointillism, they are equally rooted in Asian painting techniques. Pierre Restany, a central figure to the Nouveau Realism? in the 1960s and with whom Lee made an acquaintance during his stay in Paris, stated, "As for us Westerners, we cannot help but think of Pointillism and Fauvism in front of the explosion of colour that mingles in the very rhythm of life. But it is no doubt that this approach is a superficial one and that it does not go to the bottom of the problem. Lee Dai-Won's trees are the pure product of stenographic writing with points and lines that belong to the great graphical Korean tradition of ink painting."(Pierre Restany, Real Affidavit of Universal Emotion, Monthly Art website)
Lee Dai-Won is a talented composer of the variations on the theme of nature; he presents existential impermanence and rhythm of nature with his coloured points and lines. Restany admired Lee's work, stating, "That deep nature of the universe which is the unique theme of his art and which beautifully projects the plenitude of joie de vivre. Such a message does not know any frontier. It is the basic affidavit of a universal emotion."(Ibid) Equivalent to his contemporary painter Kim Whan-Ki who is considered one of the greatest pioneers in the history of Korean modern art, Lee established himself as an innovator, finding his own way in representing Korean landscape and embodying Korean spirit in Western material.