The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) presents a key work from the Nucleus series by Lee Seung Jio as a part of Hyundai Card First Look. Celebrating the partnership between MoMA and Hyundai Card, this new programming aims to highlight modern and contemporary Korean art and to discover and foster promising artists and curators. The series presents recent acquisitions from MoMA’s vast collection of painting, design, film, photography and sculpture in dedicated public spaces on the Museum’s second and third floors. Among the first artists featured are Lee Seung Jio, a pioneering figure in Korean geometric abstraction, and Martine Gutierrez, an American performance artist.

On view on the Museum's third floor is Nucleus F-G-999 (1970), a representative work from Lee’s Nucleus series. With its prominent pipe-like cylinders as a motif, the work symbolizes modern civilization and the rapid advancement of technology. Lee meticulously applied color using a flat brush and masking tape, then sanded down each layer to create a pulsating field of light. Such a process allowed the artist to add the illusion of metallic surfaces to the painting, further exploring the ideas of flatness and three-dimensionality, the abstract and the figurative. The exhibition runs through fall 2024.