ART CITIES:N.York, Seung-Taek Lee
Seung-Taek Lee is one of the first generation of South Korean artists to have embraced the idea of experimentalism in art, and has developed a diverse practice ranging from sculpture and installation to performance and land art, often influenced by Korean traditions and folk sensibilities. Born in Kowon, North Korea, he moved South during the Korean War and has been living and working in Seoul since.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Lévy Gorvy Gallery Archive
The first solo exhibition with works of the Korean artist Seung-Taek Lee is on presentation at the Lévy Gorvy Gallery in New York. Throughout his 60 years long career, he has continually challenged traditional notions of identity and history, forging new paths for the artistic expression of nature, philosophy, and spatial experience.In the exhibition are on presentation 40 works spanning the late 1950s to the present day and feature pivotal works from Lee’s oeuvre, including “Non-Sculpture” (1960), photographs from his 1971 performance “Wind-Folk Amusement” and several “Wind” paintings from the ‘60s through the present wherein curving lengths of rope give shape to the ephemeral movements of air. A pioneer of the Korean avant-garde, which emerged after the end of the Korean War in 1953, Lee has repeatedly engaged political, cultural, and environmental themes. His prolific body of work encompasses diverse media including sculpture, installation, performance, and Land art. Notions of negation—which the artist alternately refers to as: “Dematerialization”, “Nonsculpture” and “Anti-concept”, structure his approach, by which he transforms ordinary objects, imbuing them with metaphysical meanings. Embracing invisible forces and unorthodox materials such as tree branches, wire, stones, human hair, fabric, rope, and Korean hanji paper, his work elevates the mundane to the level of the mythical. Insistently material and rooted in a concrete poetics of place, it honors the subtle, unassuming beauty of Korean cultural traditions and folk art. Its frequent invocations of nature and process align with contemporaneous developments in Earth Art, Mono-ha, and Post-Minimalism. Born in 1932 in Gowon (North Korea), Lee moved to South Korea in 1950. Since then he has been living and working in Seoul. In the late ‘50s, Lee began his “Godret Stone” series, whose title alludes to the stones used by Korean artisans when weaving traditional mats. Suspended from wooden bars with rope, the stones appear soft and floating, thus contradicting their solid physicality. As an Avant-Garde artist working at the periphery of mainstream Korean art scene throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s, Lee pursued his radical artistic experiments in relative isolation, and shifted his focus to the representation of imperceptible natural phenomena such as wind, fire, water, smoke, and fog, thus furthering his exploration of forms that defy conventional aesthetic values of stasis and solidity. His fascination with history and the extra-physical led him to understand the artist’s role as “Connecting different worlds in search of another realm” as he aptly described.
Info: Lévy Gorvy Gallery, 909 Madison Avenue, New York, Duration: 15/3-22/4/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.levygorvy.com
