Lee Seung Taek's Non-Art: The Inversive Act
25 November 2020 – 28 March 2021
MMCA Seoul
The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA, Director Youn Bummo), is unveiling from 25 November (Wed.) to 28 March 2021 (Sun.) Lee Seung Taek's Non- Art: The Inversive Act at the MMCA Seoul.
Lee Seung Taek (b. 1932) is a representative figure in Korean experimental art who continued to produce works of art spanning installation, sculpture, painting, photography, land art, and performance art since the 1950s until today. Lee Seung Taek's Non-Art: The Inversive Act is a large- scale retrospective that aims to revisit the sixty-year career of Lee, who has played a pioneering role in transforming the Korean contemporary art scene with his unique artistic values.
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The title of the exhibition, Lee Seung Taek's Non-Art: The Inversive Act encapsulates the artist's artistic career during which he challenged fixed notion of art and inverting every kind of object and idea. His artistic views are well expressed in his statement: "My view was inverted. My thought process was inverted. My life in this world was inverted." They are also well expressed in his concept of "non-sculpture," through which he challenged the established grammar of sculpture.
This exhibition also attempts to reexamine the works of Lee Seung Taek who has built on a unique artistic world of his own by ceaselessly traversing the boundaries of art versus non-art, materials versus non-material as well as subject verses object. Lee's major works from the 1960s are revisited to explore Lee's works produced in the early stages of his career while newly shedding light on the shamanistic values entailed in his overall art world. Shamanism was the beginning of the world of non-sculpture where Lee moved away from the modern sculptural concepts of the West towards the world of heterogeneity deemed by him as "inversive." The exhibition also sheds light on many of Lee's works that utilize the photographic medium dating back to the early days of his career, and in particular Lee's "photo picture," a combination of photographs with other paintings, through which the artist’s inversive aesthetics can be newly revisited.
At Exhibition Hall 6, Lee's innovative experiments with forms towards "non-structure" is reproduced through the themes of "experiments with materials," "tying and deconstruction" and "formless works." Focusing on experiments on new materials - traditional earthenware, vinyl, lumber, coal briquettes and other everyday objects - from the 1960s, Lee began to move away from the concept of sculptural materials that have been widely perceived across the artistic scene at the time. Beginning from around the 70s, he began his attempts to create works incorporating non- material factors such as wind, fire and smoke into his artwork, which was dubbed as experiments of "formless works." In addition, Lee employed a new perspective on the unique meaning and values of objects through his "tying" series, where he began tying objects such as stones, female torsos, books, old documents, paper money with twines. His continued artistic experiments and challenges against conventional art had been conceptualized as "non-sculpture" by around 1980s.
Based on the large number of Lee's iconic "tying" series produced from the 1950s to 80s as well as exhibition archives of the time, this retrospective newly sheds spotlight on the artist's initial experiments by reproducing Lee's major artworks of the 60s including and Growth(Tower) (1964) and Untitled (1968). It also sheds light on the original piece of Wind showcased during the second A.G. Exhibition - Reality and Realization in 1971, Wind (also known as paper tree) of 1980s as well as the monumental Wind series in a multifaceted way through large-scale installation, photograph and video.
Since the mid-80s, Lee began to expand his area of interests to include life-related aspects including society, history, environment, religion and gender, as well as shamanism, and expanded his work scope to include performance, large-scale installations and photography. The works displayed at Exhibition Hall 7 and Media Lab, are put on show under the themes of "Life, Society and History," "Action, Process and Painting," as well as "Shamanism and Non-Sculpture at the Crossroad." Through Untitled (1994) and Fratricidal War (1994) whose themes are the division of Korea and the Donghak Peasant Revolution, one can come across Lee's true aspects as both an avant- garde artist and a historian. Earth Play (1991~2000s), which is a series produced while traveling across Korea, Japan, China, Germany and many other countries, entails a message of recovering the ecosystem by remedying damaged nature and reviving the planet Earth. The exhibition also examines the artist's paintings, where he highlights his actions, process and the present feeling of vivid life, Suffering of Green (1996), where Lee turned the natural process of burning the canvas and droplets of water colors into artistic creations as well as Painting Water (1995/2020) that entails the very process of the effects of falling water droplets while highlighting the artist’s actions and process.
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From early on, Lee believed that "what is local is most global," and took the most traditional motifs of folk goods, godret stones, stone pagodas, earthenware, shrine to the village deity, urns and roof tiles as the sources of non-material. Centering around the original piece showcased at Lee's 1986 solo exhibition Lee Seung Taek:Non-Sculpture (Hu Gallery), at the Media Lab, one can re- explore the impact and significance of shamanism that has been continued on as part of people's lives had on Lee's overall art career.
Along the corridor, Drawing Wave on the Sand (1987) and Villa of Artist (1987-88) and other unique photographs of the artists are put on display. Lee's works widely known as "photo pictures," that involve painting images on top of photographs of his performance at mountains or oceans in a kind of photo montage approach to establish a virtual space where the artist is able to materialize the unfinished project that he had envisioned. Juxtaposing photography with painting and reality with fiction, Lee's photographs encompass his unique "inversed aesthetic" which uses fiction to interrogate the truth.
At the museum's outdoor space, Lee's 4 large-scale installations will be put on display. Land Wearing Roof Tiles (1988/2020) and Sound of Wind (late 1970s/2020) will be installed at the Museum Madang while 2 of the Wind series including the monumental Wind of 1970s~80s, which involved suspending a 100-meter-long blue fabric between buildings of the Hongik University campus back in 1970 so that it would flap in the wind, will be displayed at the Jongchinbu (Office of Royal Genealogy) Madang.
Lee Seung Taek's Non-Art: The Inversive Act will also be streamed online via MMCA's YouTube channel (youtube.com/mmcakorea) in the form of "Exhibition Tour with Curator." Curator Bae Myungji will introduce the exhibition with detailed explanations on 31 December (Thurs.) 4 p.m. Even after the live streaming, the video will be available via YouTube.
The exhibition catalogue to be published in January, 2021 will include interviews of many artists - Kim Yisoon, Yoon Jinsup, Lee Youngchul, Lee Ihnbum, Cho Sujin, Choi Bonglim- as well as Artistic Director Hans Ulrich Obrist of Serpentine Galleries.
Director Youn Bummo of MMCA described Lee Seung Taek's Non-Art: The Inversive Act as a "large- scale retrospective of Lee who is a representative figure in Korean experimental art," and added that "it will be an opportunity to revisit Lee's journey of the past 6 decades, through which he ceaselessly challenged the fixed notion of art and to newly shed light on where the artist stands in the Korean art history."
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About the Artist
Image provided by MMCA
Selected Solo Exhibitions 2018 White Cube, London, United Kingdom 2017 Palazzo Caboto, Venice, Italy Lévy Gorvy Gallery, New York, USA 2015 Drawing, GALLERY HYUNDAI, Seoul, Korea 2014 Think Reform, GALLERY HYUNDAI, Seoul, Korea 2012 Lee Seung-taek 1932-2012: Earth, Wind and Fire, Sungkok Art Museum, Seoul, Korea 2004 Seung-taek Lee: Non-Material Work, Museum for Independents& Alternatives, Seoul, Korea 1997 Seung-taek Lee:50 Years of Experimental Art, Arko Art Center, Seoul, Korea 1991 Seung-taek Lee: Photographs, Paints & Objects, Hanseon Gallery, Seoul, Korea 1989 Noksaek Gallery, Seoul, Korea 1988 Kwanhoon Gallery, Seoul, Korea 1987 Seung-taek Lee: Non-Sculpture,P&P Gallery, Seoul, Korea 1986 Gallery K, Tokyo, Japan Hu Gallery, Seoul, Korea 1983 Seung-taek Lee: Non-Sculpture, Total Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea 1982 Kwanhoon Gallery, Seoul, Korea
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1981 Kwanhoon Gallery, Seoul, Korea 1971 National Central Information Center, Seoul, Korea
Selected Awards 2017 JCC Art Prize, JCC Museum, Seoul, Korea 2016 Kim Se-Choong Sculpture Award, Kim Se-Choong Commemoration Foundation, Seoul, Korea 2014 Eungwan (Silver Crown) Order of Cultural Merit, Korea 2009 Nam June Paik Art Center Prize, Nam June Paik Art Center, Yongin, Korea 2000 Bogwan (Precious Crown) Order of Cultural Merit, Korea 1985 Grand Prize, International Outdoor Sculpture Festival, Aomori Museum of Art, Japan 1977 Grand Prize, Space Art Awards, SPACE Magazine, Korea
Selected Public Collections National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, Australia Olympic Sculpture Park, Seoul, Korea Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea Seoul Olympic Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom The Rachofsky Collection, Dallas, USA M Plus Museum, Hongkong
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Exhibition view
Lee Seung Taek's Non-Art: The Inversive Act , exhibition view at MMCA Seoul. Photo: MEDIASCOPE. Image provided by MMCA.
Lee Seung Taek's Non-Art: The Inversive Act , exhibition view at MMCA Seoul. Photo: MEDIASCOPE. Image provided by MMCA.
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Attachments Lee Seung Taek's Non-Art: The Inversive Act
Lee Seung Taek (b. 1932) is a representative figure in Korean experimental art who has continued since the 1950s until today with a prolific body of work spanning installation, sculpture, painting, photography, land art, and performance art. Lee Seung Taek's Non-Art: The Inversive Act is a large- scale retrospective that aims to shed new light on the sixty-year career of an artist who played a pioneering role in transforming Korean contemporary art. The exhibition title Lee Seung Taek's Non- Art: The Inversive Act encapsulates a career spent inverting every kind of object and idea, challenging fixed notions of art. His artistic views are well expressed in his declaration, “My view was inverted. My thought process was inverted. My life in this world was inverted.” and through the concept of “non-sculpture” by which he strove to break free of existing sculptural contexts.
In the 1950s, Lee challenged the established grammar of sculpture with his work History and Time; during the 1960s, he began parting ways with sculptural concepts prevalent in the Korean art establishment of the time, immersing himself in new material experiments with everyday items such as earthenware, plastic, glass, wood, and coal ashes. Around the 1970s, he created works with “non- material elements” such as wind, fire, and smoke and rendered locations and situations into artwork; he used his “tying” work—which involved tying artificial and natural objects with twine—to explore the inherent meaning and value of objects in a new light. Thus challenging and experimenting existing art, Lee arrived at the concept of “non-sculpture” established in 1980. In the mid-1980s, he began broadening the horizons of his interests into areas of human life such as society, history, culture, and the environment, expanding the realm of art through works of performance, large-scale installation, and photo paintings.
The exhibition includes reproductions of major works from the 1960s based on historical materials, as well as restorations of the artist’s early works in pursuit of “non-sculpture.” Some of Lee’s major installations of the 1970s and 1980s, such as Wind and Land Wearing Roof Tiles, have been restaged in the museum’s outdoor settings, providing the opportunity for a direct physical experience. The exhibition also illuminates the key influence of shamanism in Lee’s work. Numerous photo collages and photographs combined with painting (called “photo paintings” or “photo pictures”) are shared from the period between the 1960s and 1990s, in an attempt to newly spotlight the significance of Lee’s photography. This exhibition’s attempt at “re-reading” the art of Lee Seung Taek—the trailblazer who led the transition of Korean contemporary art by relentlessly traversing the boundaries of material versus non-material, subject versus object, art versus non-art—will hopefully provide an opportunity for affirming the contemporaneity of his art.
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List of Works
1. Experimenting with Materials: Questions about Sculpture During the 1960s, Lee Seung Taek began challenging the concepts of sculpture as required by the art establishment, pursuing experimentation with new materials and unconventional approaches to installation. He employed new materials ranging from traditional earthenware to industrialization materials such as glass and plastic and ordinary items such as coal briquettes, steel, lumber and cement—which were not perceived as sculptural materials at the time. Artwork made from these materials would be placed on the ground without a plinth, suspended from the ceiling as formless objects, or stacked up liked a tower—a free approach to installation that marked the beginning of a departure from established sculptural grammar. Lee’s experiments with materials and pursuit of non-sculpture in the 1960s would be presented at exhibitions representing new currents at the time, including Sinsanghoe (New Image Associations, 1962–1963), Wonhyeonghoe (Original Form Association, 1964), Contemporary Artists Exhibition (1968), Korean Contemporary Sculpture Exhibition (1969), and A.G. (1970). Many of them were also exhibited in the form of archival photographs at Lee’s first solo exhibition, held in 1971 at the National Public Information Center. For this exhibition, major works from the 1960s have been reproduced based on exhibition materials from the time, and the artist’s early experiments are examined anew. Lee Seung Taek, Growth(Tower), 1964/2020, Earthenware, 360x50x50cm. Courtesy of the artist.
Reproduced in 2020, Growth(Tower), was originally an oji (glazed earthenware) work in the early 1960s using onggi (Korean earthenware) clay and techniques. Composed of oji objects stacked up from the ground like a tower, this work demonstrated a radical method of installation at a time when presenting works on pedestals was the established sculptural syntax. As stated in “The Origin of My Non-Sculptures” written by Lee in 1980, the oji works he produced in the 1960s were inspired by Korean traditional pots and crocks. The artist believed that because every Korean household had onggi pots and Koreans have used and lived with them for centuries, we feel an instant sense of familiarity in the presence of onggi. He thought anything made of onggi could immediately be absorbed into the realm of something that is “Korean” or “ours,” and hence came to produce oji works reminiscent of meju (fermented soy blocks), conical hats, and flowers, not to mention abstract forms. The artist was born in Gowon, Hamgyeongnam-do, a village that happens to be known as a “potters’ village,” and the influence of the clay- molding artisans is evident in his oji works.
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(Top) Lee Seung Taek, Untitled, 1968/2018, Stainless steel, steel, urethane vinyl, Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist (Bottom) Lee Seung Taek, Untitled, 1968/2018, Stainless steel, steel, urethane vinyl, 363x185x110cm, 335x130x150cm. Courtesy of the artist
Made of intense blue, red, and yellow vinyl, this Untitled installation produced by Lee Seung Taek in 1968 was reproduced in 2018. Lee built the geometrical frameworks using steel then wrapped them with vinyl of primary colors and stacked them on top of each other or propped them up around the floor. The introduction of vinyl, both an everyday material and new material symbolic of the 1960s industrialization, was an innovative attempt at a time when sculptures were mostly made of steel, bronze, and wood. This work was shown at the Contemporary Artists Exhibition hosted by the Chosun Ilbo in 1968. The Kyunghyang Shinmun ran an illustration of this work on January 11, 1969, introducing it as “an example of a contemporary attempt” and reporting that Lee’s work ultimately had to be exhibited in a separate space because the colors were so intense that other works couldn’t possibly be placed around them. The use of the new material, the large scale of the 360-centimeter-tall installation, the geometric form, and the bright primary colors can be seen as what set this work apart from the sculptural tendency at the time.
2. String—Tying and Deconstruction: Toward Non-Sculpture In the work of Lee Seung Taek, “tying” objects with string and twine represents an important non- sculpture aesthetic methodology used by the artist to invert the forms and nature of items and subvert familiar everyday experience. This began with a 1958 work for History and Time in which Lee affixed barbed wire to an object; during the 1960s, he would bind plastic in twine or tie pieces of wood together with fabric. In the 1970s, he mainly began tying objects such as stones, ceramics, female torsos, books, banknotes, and canvas with cords, while also producing the visual effect of movement by repeatedly attaching twine to a canvas. During the 1980s, he expanded the act of tying from objects to spaces, binding branches in fabric or paper and setting up installations in which cords and sticks connected by knots were positioned to match their indoor setting. The language of tying bears some connections with the ethnological experience of tying things with godret stones and straw rope, but the artist adopts a characteristic ironic approach in which he creates an optical illusion through the inscription of imaginary rope-tying marks on objects to bring about a visual transition or to evoke inferences of objects’ hidden aspects and imaginary changes. The tying of ceramics, books, old documents, canvases, and banknotes signifies conceptual resistance to the civilization, discourse, knowledge, artistic establishment, and capitalist system that they symbolize. At times, the artist would juxtapose the process of tying with an act of deconstruction, deconstructing a canvas frame to attach paper, fraying rope, or untying bundles of bills.
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Lee Seung Taek, History and Time, 1958, Wire, painted on plaster, 153x144x23cm. MMCA Collection.
Unveiled at the 4th Hongik University College of Fine Arts Graduation Exhibition held in 1958, History and Time was a work metaphoric of the 1950s politics and its impact on Korea. The red and blue symbolized the cold war ideology surrounding the United States and the Soviet Union while the coiled- up wire represented the Korean people who fell victim to the power struggle. The parabolic structure made of plaster alluded to the historic temporality,
asking what trajectory Korean history should take after such woeful circumstances.
Lee Seung Taek, Untitled, Lee Seung Taek, Hip, 1972, Lee Seung Taek, Tied White 1974, Stone, wire, Paint, vanish on plaster, rope, Porcelain, 1975, Porcelain, 29x35x32cm. Courtesy of the 57x38.5x22.5cm. Courtesy of 33.5x34.5cm. Obayashi artist. the artist. Collection.
Featured at the 21st National Art Exhibition held in 1972, Hip was the representative work of Lee Seung Taek’s Tied Woman Body series produced in the 1970s. Unlike other representations of the female body at the time, this sculpture was characterized by tie marks that attested to the body previously being bound by a rope. These marks maximized the physicality of fleshly suppression and release while emphasizing muscular tension and the sense of volume and vitality unique to a human body. Along with this piece, Lee produced a series of works under the title Tied Woman Body, some of which went on to win the Dong-A Art Award in 1978.
Lee Seung Taek, Untitled, 1972, Rope on canvas, 131x85.5x4.5cm. Private collection.
Untitled shown at the 1972 Contemporary Sculpture Invitational Exhibition held at the National Public Information Office by Goethe Institut presented the canvas as a flat object. The rope, meticulously glued onto the canvas, visualized the movement of the wind. In the 1970s, Lee Seung Taek not only produced a series of works that tied artificial and natural objects with ropes and twines, but he also produced a series of works that attached ropes onto canvases to create repetitive patterns that create an illusion of movement. This piece was produced in the 1970s, around the same time his famous outdoor installation series Wind was produced.
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Lee Seung Taek, Dismantlement of Language, 1979, Paper, ink on canvas, 100.5x73.5x2cm. Courtesy of the artist.
In the late 1970s, Lee Seung Taek began to produce the Dismantlement of Language series featuring objects such as books tied with twine. Dabbing ink onto the type bars of a typewriter and repeatedly printing letters onto the canvas, this work creates an illusion that the alphabets in the book have spilled out onto the canvas. Presenting a scene in which the language is separated from the book, this work, similarly to his other works that bind books with twine, rejects and resists canonized knowledge, discourse, and system. To the
artist, the act of dismantlement is as much of his own paradoxical language as the act of binding—a language devised to overturn objects and ideas.
3. Formless Works Lee SeungTaek began his conception of “formless works” in 1964 with his production of Untitled(Burning Canvases Floating on the River), which depicted canvases that had been set on fire floating down the Han River. “Formless artwork” refers to the incorporation of natural phenomena such as wind, fire, and smoke into artwork; it is characterized by its amorphous and non-material aspects, in that it does not possess a clear shape and disappears with the passage of time. Beginning with the outdoor installation Wind in 1969, Lee’s formless work was truly realized with his production of a monumental 1970 work also titled Wind, which involved suspending blue fabric by a single cord between buildings on the Hongik University campus so that it would flap in the wind. Wind was later presented at the 11th São Paulo Biennial and the 2nd A.G. in 1971. The Wind series is considered among Lee SeungTaek’s most representative work, with numerous variations between the 1970s and 2000s. In the artist’s words, it represented an expression of “interest in non-materials,” and it is intended to “visualize otherwise invisible air” by incorporating twine, rags, and Korean paper. The artist’s interest in non-materiality would reach the point where works such as Untitled(Burning Canvases Floating on the River)(c.1988) and Performance Art of Burning(1989) would stage acts of burning to perform the total destruction of an artwork with physical materiality. “Formless works” can also be seen in Lee's “privatization” series with works such as A Play of Tree Mouth(1968) that achieved completion through intervention in some existing environment or structure without the artist’s production of anything.
Lee Seung Taek, Untitled, 1970(Reprinted in 1971), Paint on photo, 40x58cm. Courtesy of the artist.
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Lee Seung Taek, Wind(Paper Tree), 1983, Mulberry Han paper, tree branch
Also known as Paper Tree, this installation representative of Lee Seung Taek’s Wind series produced in the 1980s is composed of paper strips that hang from tree branches. This work also gained spotlight at Korea Contemporary Art Exhibition held at the Korean Cultural Center in Los Angeles in 1984. As described by the artist in the statement, “As the tree morphs into paper, there arises wind. And the freedom makes the paper dance around in joy,” the strips of paper derived from trees were tied to tree branches to poetically visualize the subtle movement of the invisible wind. The 30 some paper trees hanging from the 12-meter-tall ceiling created a grand scene to evoke imagination of the wind passing through the trees. Lee Seung Taek, Untitled (Burning canvases Floating on the River), c.1988, Color on c-print, 81.5x116cm. MMCA Collection.
Untitled (Burning Canvases Floating on the River) is a photograph documentative of the performance in which Lee Seung Taek floated burning canvases down the Han River. After setting his figurative (and hence “worthless”) paintings on fire, Lee let them flow down the Han River as a performance resistant to and rejective of the existing artistic canon. At the same time, the canvases (objects) in the performance were used as a medium to draw attention to natural elements—how wind, water, and fire react to the event. Here, the artist merely acts as an agent that starts the fire and the rest of the performance is carried out by the phenomenological changes in the natural behavior of the water, wind, and fire.
Lee Seung Taek, A Video of Performance Art of Burning, 1989
Lee Seung Taek’s artistic interest in nonmaterial elements such as wind, fire, and smoke evolves to a point where he begins to annihilate his material works using fire as demonstrated by this immolation performance. In 1989, Lee hosts an immolation festival at the Total Gallery in Jangheung and on Nanjido Island, burning his own paintings, sculptures, and installation works, as well as spaces and objects. Through this act of immolation, the artist sought to challenge everything christened “art.” In other words, it was a radical practice of “non-art,” a term coined by Lee himself.
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Lee Seung Taek, A Play of Tree Mouth, 1968, Paint on gelatin silver print, 60.6x51.3cm. Courtesy of the artist.
A Play of Tree Mouth is a representative piece among Lee Seung Taek’s “privatization” series that sought to present a site as an artwork by adding minimal installation to existing places—in this case, a pencil factory where wood pieces were stacked in large circular piles. Regarding this project, which transforms places into art, the artist explained that he was “specifying a place that only I can privatize under the mission of christening a place or subject as mine as a way of interpreting them.” A Play of Tree Mouth is an example of Lee’s idiosyncratic conceptual artwork, completed not through
hand labor per se but through selection and intervention.
4. Life, Society, and History Born in Gowon, Hamgyeongnam-do (part of North Korea today), during the Japanese occupation, Lee Seung Taek traveled to the South during the Korean War and would symbolically represent Korea’s division in 1958 with his History and Time. His artistic interest in Korea’s modern and contemporary history broadened further in the 1980s as the context of this art came to incorporate the multilayered horizons of life, including society, history, politics, the environment and ecology, religion, and gender. For the artists, topics such as Korean modern and contemporary history (including the Donghak Revolution and Korea’s division), the art establishment and cultural authorities, idolized religions, and taboo sexuality were both objects for reflection and topics for irony and “viewing upside down.” Aspects of Lee as both an avant-garde artist and a historian can be seen in his major works since the 1990s, including Untitled, Fratricidal War, Last Supper of the Power, and At Last, Art Has Been Garbage. By the mid-1980s, the artist’s interests would also begin to encompass the environment and ecology. The works in his series Artist Planting Moss and Greening Campaign (Making Hills Green), as well as the Earth Performance series that was executed in various countries such as Korea, Japan, China, and Germany, incorporate a message about ecological recovery—healing damaged nature and restoring our planet.
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Lee Seung Taek, Untitled, 1994, Mixed media, Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist.
Untitled is a large-scale installation presented at a 1994 exhibition commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Donghak Peasant Movement. Subtitled “Bird, Bird,” this work is composed of four paintings with flames representing revolution, a raw canvas printed with text related to the revolution, a chamber pot place on top of the canvas, and a spread of soil and iron powder that symbolizes the death of the Korean people. According to the artist, this piece metaphorizes the life of the grassroots at the time of the revolution who would vomit blood into their chamber pots. This piece offers a glance into Lee’s identity as an avant-garde artist and a historian.
Lee Seung Taek, The Earth Touring Beijing, Lee Seung Taek, Last Supper of the Power, 1994, Paint on c-print, 114X92.5cm. Courtesy 1992, C-print, glass, painted tree, Dimensions of the artist. variable. Courtesy of the artist. Beginning in the early 1990s, Lee Seung Taek performed The Earth Performance in Korea, Japan, China, and Germany. Around the time, the artist began to contemplate ways to communicate environmental issues with the larger public—issues deliberately pushed aside by the agendas of urbanization and industrialization. To deliver the message that the global community must collectively take care of our one and only planet, the artist rendered a hyper-realistic satellite image of the Earth onto the surface of a five- meter radius balloon and attended art festivals to toss the balloon around with the participants as a performance. The balloon was then left in the outdoor space as an installation. While this performance was a relational artwork completed through audience interaction, it was also an environmental campaign urging restoration of the Earth’s ecology.
5. Action, Process, and Painting Lee Seung Taek’s works of painting emphasize the artist’s performance and process, as well as a vivid sense of life in its immediacy as seen in his Scorched Painting series, in which traces of burning were incorporated as part of the work, or his Water Painting series, which fully expressed the process of transformation as water was allowed to flow. Representative examples of this include his Performance Art of Burning exhibition in 1989 and To Encounter Others (Kassel) in 1992, for which he produced paintings on the scene and set fire to them to leave behind the traces; and his Performing at Jeongrim building Deconstruction Event in 1995, in which he allowed paint to flow over canvases placed over on the building’s walls and floors so that its traces would drip down to
14 / 18 form water paintings. The Sea of Mountain Peak, which only reached completion through a performative process in which a painted image of waves was carried up a mountain, offers an excellent illustration of Lee Seung Taek’s unique ironic aesthetic, which substitutes the sea with a mountain. Lee Seung Taek, Performing at Jeonglim Building Deconstruction, 1995, slide projection
In 1995, as Jeonglim Architecture built a new office building and demolished
its old one in celebration of its 30th foundation anniversary, Lee Seung Taek attended the demolition ceremony to put on a commemorative performance. Upon this performance planned by art critic Kim Honghee and executed by artists Lee Seung Taek, Kang Eunyup, and Lee Sanghyun, Lee took down the windows of the soon-to-be-demolished building, draped long canvas sheets from the windows to the ground, and hung paint pouches from the window frames to let the paint naturally drip onto the canvas. In this sense, the painting produced as a result of this performance served not as a finished painting produced by an artist but a progressive painting attesting to the overall process of the performance.
Lee Seung Taek, Suffering of Green, 1996, C- Lee Seung Taek, Water Painting, 1995/2020, print soot on wood board, paint on wood board, Acrylic on cloth, wood, 750x114cm(8). 120x280.5cm(6), 300x190.5cm(3). Courtesy of Courtesy of the artist. the artist.
6. Shamanism and Non-Sculpture at the Crossroad In 1986, Lee Seung Taek held a solo exhibition at Hu Gallery under the title Lee Seung Taek: Non- Sculpture. Consisting of installation work in which red, blue, and black cloths and pillars bound with twine are hung on the walls or placed on the floor, it evokes a shamanistic atmosphere that is odd and eerie. The artist has mentioned that the blue and red in his installation work represents yin/yang ideas of masculine and feminine, water and fire, and heaven and earth; the black and red borrows from the blankets of the old working class and their regional colors imbued with poverty and feelings of injustice, and the red paintings are metaphorical representations of ominous death and the gateway to the afterlife in his essay “ Shamanism and Non-Sculpture at the Crossroad” in the exhibition catalogue. The shamanistic world woven into our lives served as a wellspring for Lee’s artistic concept of “non-
15 / 18 sculpture.” Adopting early on the idea that the “most ethnological is the most global,” Lee Seung Taek has maintained an ongoing interest in tradition, tales, folk practices, and shamanism, incorporating Korean folk items and traditional motifs such as godret stones, stone pagodas, earthenware, shrines, urns, and tiles in his work and regarding them as the roots of non-sculpture. His work Tale was created in the 1950s based on traditional totem poles; his earthenware work from the 1960s, drew inspiration from traditional urns and crocks, while his significant Wind series in the 1970s was inspired by the colorful flags of ocean fishing rituals and the fluttering of fabric strips suspended from seonghwangdang shrines. The shamanistic energy that predominates throughout Lee’s work serves as an important source in his departure from modern sculptural concepts of the West and progression toward the world of non-sculpture, the world of heterogeneity deemed by Lee as “inversive.”
Lee Seung Taek, Untitled, 1986, Paint on cloth, Lee Seung Taek, Reinstallation of Lee Seung wood sticks wrapped in mulberry paper(from Taek:Non-Sculpture at the Crossroad (1986) at antique book) and rope, Dimensions variable. MMCA Seoul, 2020 Courtesy of the artist.
7. Between Photography and Painting Since the 1960s, Lee Seung Taek has gone beyond the idea of photography-as-record to experiment with the various possibilities of photography by creating collage and painting works in which a different photograph is placed over a developed photograph. With photographic works representing the main items exhibited at his first solo exhibition in 1971, the photographic medium has held a meaning for the artist beyond that of “recording.” In addition to composing new images by combining background spaces with images in a kind of photo montage approach, Lee has also contributed a sense of immediacy to his spaces by placing himself within the angle of the image in order to establish or exaggerate a work’s size. Since the 1980s onward, the artist produced a large body of photo paintings (photo pictures), venturing into mountains or seascapes as in Drawing Falls or Drawing Wave on the Sand to photograph a performance, eventually drawing over the printed image. These photo pictures created a virtual space
16 / 18 for the artist to achieve his unfinished projects. Additionally, Lee Seung Taek’s photograph combining photographs with other images generate an unfamiliar effect, which results from the collision between two disparate images. For example, the photo picture Villa of Artist, in which a pile of wood has been photographed and colored over, transforms an ordinary scene into a setting for conceptual art. Juxtaposing photography with painting, reality with fiction, his unique works of photography encompass the artist’s unique “upside down aesthetic,” which uses fiction to interrogate truth.
Lee Seung Taek, Hell and Lee Seung Taek, Drawing Lee Seung Taek, Villa of Artist, Heaven are Filled to Bursting, Wave on the Sand, 1987, Paint 1987-1988, Paint on c-print, late 1990s, Paint on photo on c-print, 91x114cm. 50x60cm. Courtesy of the montage, 121x84cm. Courtesy Courtesy of the artist. artist. of the artist.
8. Lee Seung Taek’s outdoor installation
Lee Seung Taek, Wind, 1970/2020, Cloth, rope, Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist.
In 1970, Lee Seung Taek produced Wind, a monumental installation composed of blue cloth strips that flutter in the wind tied to an approximately 100-meter long rope stretched across two Hongik University buildings. The
2020 exhibition Lee Seung Taek's Non-Art: The Inversive Act presents an outdoor reinstallation of the work—cloth strips tied to an approximately 70- meter long rope connecting two MMCA Seoul buildings. The movement and
the sound of the blue cloth fluttering with the wide-open sky as its backdrop
and the perpetually changing form represent the invisible flow of air in the most poetic way, proposing not a fixed “form” but an ever-changing and generative “circumstance” as a work of art.
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Lee Seung Taek, Wind, 1988/2020, Steel, color band, Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist.
Lee Seung Taek’s Wind (1988), colorful strips strung between trees that gently dance in the wind to visualize the invisible air, is a prominent work among the eponymous series produced in the 1980s. This piece was reinstalled at the Jongchinbu Madang of MMCA Seoul. Also known as Bird-Chasing Wind, this piece was inspired by an apparatus used by farmers to drive birds away from the fields. A form of land art, this work presents the ever-changing and evolving natural circumstance itself as a work of art.
Lee Seung Taek, Land Wearing Roof Tiles, 1988/2020, Roof tile, steel, lumber, wood panel, soil, 300x1,850x250cm. Courtesy of the artist.
Lee Seung Taek’s Land Wearing Roof Tiles was first unveiled in 1988 at the Invitational Exhibition of World Outdoor Sculptures as part of the Olympiad of Art: International Contemporary Art Festival held in celebration of the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul. This work was reinstalled under the same title for this solo exhibition at the Gallery Madang of MMCA Seoul. Lee developed an interest in Korean traditional giwa roof tiles early in his career, producing Tiled Roof in 1967, a clay work that can be seen as a prototype of Land Wearing Roof Tiles. As described by the artist, this piece takes the form of roof tiles, originally meant to be placed on top of houses, migrating down to the ground to embrace the vast land.
Lee Seung Taek, Sound of Wind, late 1970s/2020, Fish net, rope, Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist.
Sound of Wind holds a special status among Lee Seung Taek’s outdoor installation series exploring the theme of “wind.” Whereas most of the works in the series incorporate strips of fabric or paper tied around trees or ropes that flutter in the wind to give form to the invisible flow of air, this piece uses a fishing net to capture the “sound” of the wind rather than its “form.” The unique sound created by air passing through the net allows for the audience to auditorily imagine the wind. This piece was initially inspired by the artist’s auditory memory of the wind passing through the extensive lands of his hometown in Gowon, Hamgyeongnam-do (North Korea).
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