Lee Kang So Dwelling in Mist and Glow

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. — Lee Kang So

Following a major retrospective of Lee Kang So’s 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’s 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’s 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’s deep engagement with nature: ‘Dwelling in mist and glow / Befriending wind and moon’. Lee Kang So profoundly resonates with the poet’s 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, ‘When mind and cosmos become one, self and object dissolve.’

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’s 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’ emphasis on individual expression. Some of his works also display drips and spatters reminiscent of Cy Twombly’s oeuvre. 

Harnessing each movement’s expressive potential, Lee Kang So has forged a singular path to painting that foregrounds, as art historian Robert C. Morgan sets forth, ‘the gesture as the essential movement, the way into the space, the Tao of everything alive and noble and fecund in nature.’ Communing with his paintbrush, Lee aims to kindle ‘Spirit Resonance,’ 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, ‘Endless cultivation and training conveys my spirit precisely in the interactions between body and brush, paint and canvas.’

Dwelling in Mist and Glow bears witness to the progression of Lee Kang So’s pictorial practice, from his rarely exhibited paintings of the late 1980s and 1990s to recent works on canvas from the 2010s. Lee’s stylistic evolution is evinced by his treatment of deer, ducks and boats – the leitmotifs that recur throughout his oeuvre. The lone boat is endowed with particular significance in the artist’s work, ‘both operat[ing] as a symbolic metaphor of “crossing”, 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,’ writes art critic Minemura Toshiaki. ‘This latter kind of “crossing” is none other than the point of convergence and identification between modern Western painting and East Asian ink painting found in Lee’s work.’

While the boat is rendered in relative detail in Lee Kang So’s earliest paintings on display, it is reduced to a mere outline in subsequent works, surrendering to the artist’s sensuous, spontaneous markmaking. As Minemura Toshiaki contends, ‘the strange attraction of Lee’s painting does not lie in its images, but arises from the conflict and conversation between images and the various elements that threaten and seek to negate them.’ Indeed, over time, the pure, non-representational painterly gesture takes increasing precedence over the figurative impulse embodied by the boat to express the ineffable sublimity of natural forces.

The exhibition establishes a fertile dialogue between Lee Kang So’s paintings and his sculptures, revealing the ‘pure energy’ that permeates both facets of his practice. In Untitled-94095 (1994), Lee’s signature boat – having broken away from the canvas to materialise in space – glides meditatively through the courtyard connecting the gallery's first and second floors, amid blocks of bronze that approximate tridimensional brushstrokes. Further channelling Lee’s vital artistic flow, the sculptural installation Paljindo (1981/2017) springs from the very floor of the gallery like a variegated mountainscape. The works seem to suspend time; in the artist’s words, ‘When subject and object fade into oneness, what endures is the silent process of mutual becoming.’

The 1990s were a time of extensive sculptural experimentation for the artist, who was particularly interested in the mutable materiality of hexahedrons. Sculpting in concert with gravity, he began throwing flattened clay cuboids into the air and letting them fall to the ground, yielding, in his own words, ‘sculptures made by themselves’. Similarly to the Impressionists who ceaselessly depicted the same objects to capture the ever-changing nature of light, Lee Kang So strives to give form to the perpetual flux of natural processes in his sculptures. Teetering on the point of collapse, Lee’s haptic stacks of ceramic, bronze, iron and aluminium become poetic sculptures that crystallise, as art critic Eleanor Heartney writes, ‘the accidental beauty of the natural world’.