SEOUL.- Thaddaeus Ropac announced international representation of Korean painter and sculptor Lee Kang-So (b.1943, Daegu). Recognised as one of Korea’s foremost contemporary artists, since the 1970s he has worked across photography, painting, printmaking, sculpture, installation and performance, profoundly shaping the evolution of Korean contemporary art. From the early decades of his career, he formulated an experimental practice that developed alongside the legacies of other avant-garde movements, including Mono-ha in Japan, Korean Experimental Art, Minimalism in the United States and Arte Povera in Italy.

Lee Kang-So's approach to artmaking draws on traditional East Asian philosophical and aesthetic principles with a singularly intuitive approach. From his earliest groundbreaking performances in the 1970s through to his current practice, he has established a new visual lexicon to interrogate the very praxes of painting and sculpture. — Thaddaeus Ropac

The first solo exhibition of his work will be presented in spring 2025 in the Seoul gallery. Before then, his work will be on view at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA), Seoul this September. A two-part major retrospective of the artist's career will follow at the MMCA this November and continue at the Daegu Art Museum in September 2025

In the five decades of his artistic career, the artist has shown work in numerous international institutional exhibitions – his earliest at Musée national d’art moderne, Paris in 1975 and his most recent being the major institutional touring exhibition Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s–1970s, which travelled to the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles between 2023 and 2024.

Lee Kang-So began his career staging avant-garde performances and installations, and his international reputation was cemented at the 9th Paris Biennale in 1975 when he tethered a live chicken within a chalk circle: the traces of its white dusty footprints conceived as a form of mark-making that transcended the autonomy of the artist.

Since the 1980s Lee has directed his attention to the brushstroke, fusing traditional and modern forms, working on canvas instead of rice paper and with paint instead of ink. Densely layered horizontal and vertical daubs of paint give way to sparse articulations of birds, deer, boats, mountains and houses. Elsewhere, expressive, pared-back monochromatic compositions of enlarged strokes evoke calligraphy and East Asian literati landscape traditions, while simultaneously gesturing to the aesthetics of Western minimalism.

Fundamentally driven by a deep sensitivity to his materials, Lee responds to their physical qualities to facilitate ‘coincidences’ rather than fixed, predetermined forms. Lumps of clay are thrown into the air and shaped by gravitational force, while ceramic sculptures find their form through processes of stacking and collapse. From 2010, the artist embarked on his ongoing series of Serenity paintings in which brushstrokes are directed by the rhythms of his breathing patterns, bodily sensations and qi or flow of vital energy as it is conceived in East Asian philosophy.

Lee’s main interest is the issue of representation. He juxtaposes and compares a number of visual languages, which range from photography, that undeniably definitive and mechanical method of representation, to a pencil drawing that seems to pass by swiftly ... He is an artist who experiments with everything without leaving any hypothesis out. — Philippe Dagen, art critic