ARTISTS
Lee Kang So: Dwelling in Mist and Glow
On the 50-year anniversary of the happening that propelled Korean artist Lee Kang So to international renown at the 9th Paris Biennale in 1975, the work returns to the city for the first time since this presentation in an exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Marais. The avant-garde performance, in which Lee Kang So casts a live chicken as artist, will be accompanied by works in hemp cloth executed the same year, as well as photographic, video and sculptural works that retrace his wider practice during the 1970s. Also on view will be a selection of paintings testifying to the development of Lee Kang So鈥檚 artmaking in the decades that followed this decisive period.
In the 1970s, through avant-garde performances and installations, Lee Kang So developed a highly experimental practice that profoundly shaped the evolution of Korean contemporary art. His international reputation was cemented at the 1975 Paris Biennale with his presentation at the Mus茅e d鈥橝rt moderne de la Ville de Paris of Untitled-75031, a work co-authored by a borrowed chicken, who, tethered to a wooden feeder surrounded by powdered chalk, explored the area allowed by his tether leaving chalky footprints on the floor. In recognition of the work鈥檚 50th anniversary, it will be executed again at the Paris Marais gallery, with the chicken making its chalky marks on 12 September 2025 during the opening of the exhibition.
The final work, on view until the end of the exhibition, comprises these dusty concentric traces of the chicken鈥檚 presence without the animal itself. A leading figure in the Process Art movement emerging in Korea in the 1970s, Lee Kang So transcends his own artistic autonomy to express the immaterial 鈥� presence and absence, time and transience 鈥� an exploration also evidenced by the inclusion of historic photographs of Untitled-75031 in the exhibition, which accompany each reinstallation of the work. By the time the visitor encounters the work, only the material and photographic traces of its creation remain, forming an invitation to imagine how it came to be. In the artist鈥檚 words: 鈥業 think that鈥檚 what the world is like, shaped more by what is absent than what is visible.鈥�
With my hollow awareness that everything in the world constantly forms and changes, and that I was also a part of this ever-changing structure, I meditated on how to grasp the world and myself. 鈥� Lee Kang So
The recasting of documentation of past performances as artworks in their own right is central to Lee Kang So鈥檚 meditation on ideas of transience and transformation. The exhibition presents several further examples of the artist鈥檚 experimental installations and performances from the 1970s through documentation and sculptural artefacts that become relics of the original events. Among them, a group of black and white photographs testify to the unfolding of the 1977 Painting (Event 77-2), in which a nude Lee Kang So paints his own body before wiping himself down with a canvas cloth: a gesture the artist relates to Yves Klein鈥檚 Anthropometries. The original cloth becomes a static sculptural object on the floor of the gallery, forming a reflection on the embodiment of experience and existence: 鈥榓 tactile portrait鈥�, in the artist鈥檚 words.
I was interested in expanding the language of painting to include forms that are physical, that can be wiped away, that allow for varied interpretations. 鈥� Lee Kang So
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On the 50-year anniversary of the happening that propelled Korean artist Lee Kang So to international renown at the 9th Paris Biennale in 1975, the work returns to the city for the first time since this presentation in an exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Marais. The avant-garde performance, in which Lee Kang So casts a live chicken as artist, will be accompanied by works in hemp cloth executed the same year, as well as photographic, video and sculptural works that retrace his wider practice during the 1970s. Also on view will be a selection of paintings testifying to the development of Lee Kang So鈥檚 artmaking in the decades that followed this decisive period.
In the 1970s, through avant-garde performances and installations, Lee Kang So developed a highly experimental practice that profoundly shaped the evolution of Korean contemporary art. His international reputation was cemented at the 1975 Paris Biennale with his presentation at the Mus茅e d鈥橝rt moderne de la Ville de Paris of Untitled-75031, a work co-authored by a borrowed chicken, who, tethered to a wooden feeder surrounded by powdered chalk, explored the area allowed by his tether leaving chalky footprints on the floor. In recognition of the work鈥檚 50th anniversary, it will be executed again at the Paris Marais gallery, with the chicken making its chalky marks on 12 September 2025 during the opening of the exhibition.
The final work, on view until the end of the exhibition, comprises these dusty concentric traces of the chicken鈥檚 presence without the animal itself. A leading figure in the Process Art movement emerging in Korea in the 1970s, Lee Kang So transcends his own artistic autonomy to express the immaterial 鈥� presence and absence, time and transience 鈥� an exploration also evidenced by the inclusion of historic photographs of Untitled-75031 in the exhibition, which accompany each reinstallation of the work. By the time the visitor encounters the work, only the material and photographic traces of its creation remain, forming an invitation to imagine how it came to be. In the artist鈥檚 words: 鈥業 think that鈥檚 what the world is like, shaped more by what is absent than what is visible.鈥�
With my hollow awareness that everything in the world constantly forms and changes, and that I was also a part of this ever-changing structure, I meditated on how to grasp the world and myself. 鈥� Lee Kang So
The recasting of documentation of past performances as artworks in their own right is central to Lee Kang So鈥檚 meditation on ideas of transience and transformation. The exhibition presents several further examples of the artist鈥檚 experimental installations and performances from the 1970s through documentation and sculptural artefacts that become relics of the original events. Among them, a group of black and white photographs testify to the unfolding of the 1977 Painting (Event 77-2), in which a nude Lee Kang So paints his own body before wiping himself down with a canvas cloth: a gesture the artist relates to Yves Klein鈥檚 Anthropometries. The original cloth becomes a static sculptural object on the floor of the gallery, forming a reflection on the embodiment of experience and existence: 鈥榓 tactile portrait鈥�, in the artist鈥檚 words.
I was interested in expanding the language of painting to include forms that are physical, that can be wiped away, that allow for varied interpretations. 鈥� Lee Kang So
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On the 50-year anniversary of the happening that propelled Korean artist Lee Kang So to international renown at the 9th Paris Biennale in 1975, the work returns to the city for the first time since this presentation in an exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Marais
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