The Late Lee Kang-ja Retrospective

A painter and sculptor who worked between Seoul and New York. The late Lee Kang-ja (1946–2002) was born in Daegu and graduated from the Department of Sculpture at Seoul National University College of Fine Arts. In 1998 she organized an invitational exhibition in Korea of the film actor Anthony Quinn, and arranged meetings between Quinn and the late Presidents Kim Young-sam and Kim Dae-jung and Cardinal Stephen Kim Sou-hwan.

She died a year after the last exhibition she held, “Korea Fantasy,” at the POSCO Museum in Seoul in 2001.

With the unusual background of an entire family of artists, at the 1999 “Lee Gi-in (Dongho) Family Exhibition” at the Seoul Arts Center she stood alongside siblings who represented the art world of their time in calligraphy, Western painting and sculpture, such as Lee Hwa-ja and Nam-hong. She also opened galleries in the United States and Korea to help Korean artists, including her brother, the Western painter Lee Kang-so, and Cho Young-nam, debut in the U.S. and exchange life and inspiration.