2022. 5. 25 – 7. 3
Seung-taek Lee

“Leaving the marks of binding physical forces has been a useful strategy for me as someone who likes to use tricks for reversals. Ironically, the act of binding seems to have drawn me deeper into the artistic process as it creates optical illusions with my material’s physical qualities and creates the fantasy of movement.”
– Seung-taek Lee, interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, August 2020

Gallery Hyundai presents (Un)Bound, an exhibition of the work of Seung-taek Lee, from May 25 to July 3. Gallery Hyundai’s fourth solo exhibition devoted to Lee, it follows on the heels of Lee Seung Taek’s Non-Art: The Inversive Act, a large-scale retrospective in 2020 in which the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA) looked back on the artist’s vast body of work. In its conception, the focus of (Un)Bound was on Lee’s series of “binding” works, in which twine and rope appear as a key media physically visualizing his concepts; various other works in which twine itself does not feature, but the marks of binding can be seen; and his “unbound” canvas-based work, in which the binding concept is expressed more freely. The exhibition offers a glimpse at Seung-taek Lee’s ambitious vision as someone who sought to open up new horizons in Korean contemporary art during the 1960s and 1970s through his approach of “inversively” seeing the world, thinking, and living through art.

During the late 1950s, Seung-taek Lee began sharing work of an avant-garde nature, departing from the modern Western concept of sculpture to present work originating in a “non-sculpture” concept. Instead of the traditional sculptural materials, he experimented with the boundaries of sculpture by using everyday materials and objects such as earthenware, “Godret stones,” twines, plastic, boards, paper, and books. His world of non-sculpture can be divided into two main categories. The first of them is the artist’s “non-material” series, consisting of installations and performances in which natural phenomena without physical volume, such as wind, smoke, or fire, are “sculpted” into moments that viewers can experience visually. The other major strand has been his “binding” series, which forgoes methods of sculpting or shaping to present everyday objects that are literally bound or that bear the marks of binding. The binding series in particular is something that set Lee apart from other artists of his era, representing a key aesthetic methodology for his pursuit of “non-sculpture,” or the inversion of objects’ form and nature and the subversion of everyday familiarity.

The exhibition (Un)Bound focuses on various series by Lee from the 1950s until the present in which the act of “binding” is emphasized as a strategic aesthetic language for the artist’s rejection of traditional sculptural concepts and exploration of the avant-garde. The observations of Korean critics who saw some of the few exhibitions that featured Lee’s work during the 1960s and 1970s were actively revisited by Korean and overseas researchers in the wake of the artist’s presentation with the Nam June Paik Art Center Prize in 2009. In the assessment of critic Oh Kwang-su, Lee’s work stood out from the overall level of innovation in sculpture, while his binding-based work was something distinct from the conceptual and minimalist artwork that appeared in the 1960s.

Another art historian, Joan Kee, offered a multifaceted discussion of the significance of Lee’s body of work in art history in her “Use on Vacation: The Non-Sculptures of Lee Seung-taek,” published in 2013 in the Archives of Asian Art. She concluded that Seung-taek Lee’s work from the 1960s could be seen as representing the origin of Korean installation art in light of the artist’s choice to position his uniquely scaled artwork on the floor, walls, or ceiling in a decade when there was no concept of “installation art” and most sculptures were displayed on pedestals.

The works presented in Gallery Hyundai’s basement-level gallery include the Godret Stone pieces (1957/1960s) that represented the starting point for Lee’s “non-sculpture,” as well as his large- scale Oji (traditional earthenware) pieces that apply the binding approach. The key point in the space lies in the distances between our eyes and brain as we encounter artwork that appears pliable, irrespective of the properties of the actual material. As an art student, Lee happened across a Godret stone, a traditional weaving item, at a museum in Seoul’s Deoksugung Palace. Inspired by the sight, he carved out the center of a pebble and tied it with twine to a board, which he hung up in his home. Lee believed that he could turn these hard stones into his own work through his conceptual approach to their appearance of softness. He began whittling down riverside stones of various colors and shapes whenever he had the opportunity. Experimenting with different forms, such as tying one of them to a single short block of wood or binding two of them in sequence, he developed what would become known as his “soft stone” series. This exhibition offers a glimpse at multiple variations on his Godret Stone work.

The Oji series emerged from the young 30-year-old artist Seung-taek Lee’s dogged research into ways of installing his artwork in such a way that it could hang from the ceiling or dangle toward the ground. With its modular design, his work resembles a growing organism that bears the pinched marks of binding due to the pressure applied by outside forces. Lee experimented with avant-garde transformations in which crocks—familiar items in traditional life—became contemporary art. Working in collaboration with an earthenware factory, Lee included marks of pressing and binding, while varying the shapes so that no two would be identical, each unit transforming in a different way as it was installed in a different setting.

On the first floor, the gallery presents prominent work from series in which Lee used rope—a key material in his binding series—as a way of “visualizing contradiction”: his Paper Print, Tied Porcelain, Tied Canvas, and Rope Painting. Using paper positioned on a glass pane, the Paper Print series adopts a similar process to printmaking, but the results are unique works in which inclusion of rope means that there is only one “original” present. The series in question was created between the mid-1970s and early 1980s for presentation at the International Print Biennale, which was a popular event with the public; this exhibition presents six of the 10 or so surviving works. In contrast, the Rope Painting series was something that the artist began creating as an experiment in the 1960s, first presenting it before the world through the Contemporary Sculpture Invitational Exhibition event organized in 1972 by the Goethe-Institut Korea. Fascinated by the pliable, organic materiality of the three-dimensional lines in the rope that he used as a binding tool, Lee experimented with geometric patterns that resulted in three- dimensional abstraction. The work could be seen as his unique response to Op Art, which had just begun to find its way to Korea around the mid-1960s.

The second floor gallery offers a look at the endless variations of Lee’s binding series, which incorporate old books, stones, and ceramics. In a setting designed to resemble an artist’s studio where many artworks have been assembled, viewers can see the fascinating ways in which Lee’s work constantly transforms even as it is connected together by form and context. Bound works with clearly visible rope marks and Tied Canvas works in which the artist has simply bound a canvas itself give way to other approaches in which canvases are tied with other materials such as human hair. Replete with Seung-taek Lee’s freewheeling attitude and humor, these works show how quick the artist was to observe his era, and how he never failed to respond to his times through his art. During the 1970s, human hair was considered highly valuable as a major export item for South Korea. But the wig exporting industry subsequently entered a decline and became a source of problems. One day during the early 1980s, the artist heard a vendor who was calling for people to “buy some hair!” rather than urging them to sell it. He bought a bundle of hair, and he went on to use that black Korean hair to create unusual painting series such as Dance, Hair Calligraphy, and Hairy Canvas. Resembling paintings made with black ink on achromatic canvases, the works vividly show Lee’s avant-garde spirit and rejection of constraints. As viewers encounter images that are strange and mysterious rather than familiar, they will experience a sense of shock and wonder that turns on their head the ideas they hold about objects and art.

Seung-taek Lee was born in 1932 in Kowŏn, South Hamgyŏng Province, in what is now North Korea. After majoring in sculpture at Hongik University, he joined the Wonhyung Club in 1964, embarking on innovations in the sculpture exhibition format as a member of a group exploring avant-garde aesthetics. During the 1970s and 1980s, Lee was regularly invited to take part in exhibitions with series that involved “binding” and “deconstructing” everyday objects and various materials and shapes. His ongoing artistic experimentation and challenging of established art would develop in 1980 into the concept of “non-sculpture,” as Lee increasingly pursued artwork that visualized non-material materials such as smoke, wind, fire, and water. His body of work became the focus of renewed attention and reassessment in 2009 when he was honored with the Nam June Paik Art Center Prize. Lee has held solo exhibitions at major institutions in Korea and overseas, including the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (2020), White Cube in London (2018), Lévy Gorvy in New York (2017), and Gallery Hyundai (2014 and 2015). He has also been invited to participate in the Japan/Korea/Singapore touring exhibition Awakenings: Art and Society in Asia 1960s-1990s (2019), Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945-1965 (2016), Artevida (2014), Prague Biennale 6 (2013), and the 8th Gwangju Biennale (2010). His work has been included in the collections of major world art institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (Sydney), the Tate Modern (London), the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, M+ (Hong Kong), MMCA, the Seoul Museum of Art, and Seoul Olympic Museum of Art (SOMA).

Gallery Hyundai
14 Samcheong-ro, Jongno-gu, Seoul, Korea
+82 2 2287 3500

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