Lee Dai-Won

Lee Dai-Won, whose name also appears as Lee Daiwon and Lee Dae-won and in Korean as 이대원 (Hanja: 李大源), was born in Seoul in 1921. He trained in law, graduating from the Law School of Kyung Sung Imperial University in Seoul in 1945, and developed as a painter largely without formal art-school training. He showed early promise as a child, winning a prize in an art contest hosted by the newspaper Dong-A Ilbo, and was selected for the Joseon Art Exhibition in 1938, 1939, and 1940, a significant distinction in the late colonial period.

His first solo exhibition took place at the Dong Wha Gallery in Seoul in 1957, followed by a solo show at the Asian Center in Tokyo in 1960 and exhibitions in Germany in the late 1950s. Between 1957 and 1987 he held numerous one-person exhibitions across Korea, Japan, the United States, and Europe, including eight solo exhibitions at Gallery Hyundai in Seoul between 1975 and 1995, and his work was shown at the Salon d'Automne at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1981.

Alongside his painting career, Lee taught painting at Hongik University in Seoul and, according to one retrospective account, later served as its chancellor. He served as president of the Academy of Arts in Korea in 1993. He died in 2005; available sources consistently confirm the year of his death, but an exact date and place of death are not documented in the material reviewed for this profile.

Lee Dai-Won is generally described in Korean institutional and auction-house sources as a pioneering figure in Korean figurative art, notable for building a body of pastoral, orchard, and countryside scenes and for shaping a generation of younger artists through his long teaching career at Hongik University. Available English-language sources, including museum research materials and retrospective essays, discuss him in this framing, but no exact quotation from a named critic in a major outlet could be confirmed with verbatim wording, so none is reproduced here.

Lee Dai-Won's best documented auction result is Farm, a 1987 painting that sold for KRW 660,000,000 (about USD 627,000) at Seoul Auction in Seoul on 18 December 2013. The sale took place during the auction of the seized art collection of former President Chun Doo-hwan, and bidding on the work rose from a 250 million won opening to its final price, a result widely covered in Korean press at the time. As of this writing, no reliably documented sale above that figure has surfaced in the sources reviewed, though Korean auction records for older, less liquid markets are not always fully accessible or centrally indexed.

His institutional footprint in Korea is stronger than his international auction footprint: his work is held in the collections of Gyeongnam Art Museum, Busan Museum of Art, Seoul Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Busan. Current gallery or estate representation is not documented in available sources; his most sustained historical gallery relationship was with Gallery Hyundai in Seoul, where he held eight solo exhibitions between 1975 and 1995.

Lee Dai-Won's market is thin by international standards, with a single, well-documented high-value auction result rather than a deep, continuous trading history, so any single sale should be read with that context in mind rather than as a smooth trend line. There is no confirmed catalogue raisonne and no confirmed current gallery or estate representation, which places extra weight on provenance and on the record-keeping of Korean auction houses such as Seoul Auction and K Auction. His standing is best evidenced through Korean public museum collections and institutional exhibitions rather than through a deep international secondary market, and collectors should treat exact biographical details, such as his precise birth date and place and the exact date of his death, as unresolved pending further primary documentation.