VENICE.- Gallery Hyundai presents Lee Kang-So’s solo exhibition, Becoming, at the Palazzo Caboto, Venice from 8 May – 30 June. Breaking convention, Lee Kang-So’s pioneering artistic experimentations were integral to the development of South Korea’s avant-garde performance art scene during the late 1960s and 1970s.
Coinciding with the Venice Biennale, the exhibition takes place in the historic Palazzo Caboto located on the waterfront between the Arsenale and Giardini. Gallery Hyundai returns to the building for a second time, following the Seung-taek Lee exhibition in 2017.
The first floor houses Void (1971), an installation of reeds taken from their original environment and resituated within the exhibition space. The work provides the audience with a sensory experience of perception, devoid of ideology or a conceptual worldview. Also included is Lee’s iconic work Untitled - 75031 (commonly known as the Chicken Performance ), the documentation and traces of chalk left by a chicken, first introduced at the Biennale de Paris in 1975. Acting as an observer, the work manifests happenstance or incidences that transcend calculated intention. Also on show are experimentations with imprinting simple images onto canvas by smearing paint or unravelling threads, as are works relaying autonomous brushstrokes and movement. These painting and sculpture works, from the 1980s to his current practice, demonstrate a convergence of the body, mind, and environment.
As one of Korea’s foremost experimental artists, Lee founded and participated in various artist groups and events of the 1970s, including the Shincheje Group, Daegu Contemporary Art Festival, and Seoul Contemporary Art Festival. His installation and performance works from the 1970s resemble unscripted theatrical plays which required audience participation, inviting them to react and interpret freely his loosely structured situations.
Growing up during tumultuous times in Korea, Lee did not accept Western art as it was, but instead forged his artistic career under the approach and attitude of Pungryu, a traditional Korean philosophy instilled in him since childhood. This ancient philosophy centres on intuition and truth, merging the heavens, nature, and self while embracing other ideologies. Rather than prove existence, Lee emphasizes the related spirit of qi; that is, the state of movement that comprises the relationship in which everything functions together. Influenced by these philosophical underpinnings, the artist’s experiments have spanned a variety of genres including painting, sculpture, installation, print, performance and video art.
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue, including a republication of an essay written by Joan Kee, Associate Professor at the University of Michigan; a text by art critic Minemura Toshiaki, who has written extensively on Korean art and who organised the 1975 Biennale de Paris in which Lee participated; and an edited transcript of Lee’s interview with the art historians Shin Yong-Duk and Cho Sujin.
Recent and upcoming exhibitions include: Awakenings: Art and Society in Asia 1960s - 1990s, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, 31 January – 6 May 2019, and National Gallery Singapore, 14 June – 15 September 2019; and Beyond Line: The Art of Korean Writing , LACMA, Los Angeles, 16 June – 26 September 2019.
Lee Kang-So (b.1943) lives and works in Anseong, Korea. He graduated from the Painting Department of Seoul National University in 1965. In 1985 Lee went to the State University of New York at Albany as a visiting artist whilst working as a professor in Gyeongsang University and later joined the Studio Artists Program at MoMA PS1 in 1991. His work is in numerous public and private collections internationally, including the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea; Seoul Metropolitan Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea; Daegu Art & Culture Hall, Daegu, Korea; Open Air Sculpture Garden Asadal, Gyeongju, Korea; The International Museum of 20th Century Arts & Cultural Center, Laguna Beach, California, US; Written Art Foundation, Frankfurt, Germany; and Mie Museum of Art, Miegen, Japan.
