黑料不打烊

Whether in painting or sculpture, I wish for all works to form a structure where some pure energy in myself and that in the onlooker can mutually interact. 鈥� Lee Kang So

Following a major retrospective of Lee Kang So鈥檚 work at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA) in 2024, Thaddaeus Ropac Seoul presents Dwelling in Mist and Glow, the artist鈥檚 first solo show at the gallery. Spanning five decades of his multimedia artistic production, the exhibition presents paintings, prints, sculptures and an installation that crystallise the uniquely expressive nature of Lee鈥檚 practice, which has blazed a trail in contemporary Korean art.

The title of the exhibition is drawn from a classical Korean poem written by Yi Hwang, a renowned 16th-century Confucian scholar. Composed during a retreat to Andong mountain, the poem reflects Yi Hwang鈥檚 deep engagement with nature: 鈥楧welling in mist and glow / Befriending wind and moon鈥�. Lee Kang So profoundly resonates with the poet鈥檚 sense of unity with nature, which echoes his own conception of art as an act of attunement with the natural realm and its ever-shifting rhythms, rather than personal assertion. For the artist, 鈥榃hen mind and cosmos become one, self and object dissolve.鈥�

Lee Kang So seamlessly blends elements from both traditional East Asian art and international stylistic tendencies. His quick, skillful brushwork reveals his affinity with calligraphy and ink wash painting, while his impressionistic waterscapes evoke the spiritual strokes of literati painting. Lee鈥檚 gestural mark-making, meanwhile, harks back to 1950s Abstract Expressionism and the work of Willem de Kooning in particular, albeit eviscerated of the Western painters鈥� emphasis on individual expression. Some of his works also display drips and spatters reminiscent of Cy Twombly鈥檚 oeuvre. 

Harnessing each movement鈥檚 expressive potential, Lee Kang So has forged a singular path to painting that foregrounds, as art historian Robert C. Morgan sets forth, 鈥榯he gesture as the essential movement, the way into the space, the Tao of everything alive and noble and fecund in nature.鈥� Communing with his paintbrush, Lee aims to kindle 鈥楽pirit Resonance,鈥� the vital energy that flows from the artist through to the artwork, according to 5th century principles of East Asian painting. In his own words, 鈥楨ndless cultivation and training conveys my spirit precisely in the interactions between body and brush, paint and canvas.鈥�

Dwelling in Mist and Glow bears witness to the progression of Lee Kang So鈥檚 pictorial practice, from his rarely exhibited paintings of the late 1980s and 1990s to recent works on canvas from the 2010s. Lee鈥檚 stylistic evolution is evinced by his treatment of deer, ducks and boats 鈥� the leitmotifs that recur throughout his oeuvre. The lone boat is endowed with particular significance in the artist鈥檚 work, 鈥榖oth operat[ing] as a symbolic metaphor of 鈥渃rossing鈥�, gliding across the water surface toward the other side, and realiz[ing] another sort of crossing toward the representation of a true painterly reality that transcends the delimitations of the image itself,鈥� writes art critic Minemura Toshiaki. 鈥楾his latter kind of 鈥渃rossing鈥� is none other than the point of convergence and identification between modern Western painting and East Asian ink painting found in Lee鈥檚 work.鈥�