'Lee Kang So, from chicken to duck' Exhibition review by Henri-Francois Debailleux

By Henri-François Debailleux 

In the 1990s, Korean artist Lee Kang-so painted a series of canvases that demonstrate the ease and strength of his pictorial style. In each “corner” of the work, he evoked the stylised figure of a duck, adding a touch of humour and lightness while posing the eternal question of the relationship between figuration and abstraction. On the occasion of the artist's first exhibition at the Thaddaeus Ropac gallery in Paris, a huge canvas dated 2016 masterfully shows that the duck has always been alive in his work. [...]

But it is mainly around a hen that the current exhibition is laid to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of a famous performance by Lee Kang-so: performed at the 9th Paris Biennale in 1975, it made the artist known on the international scene. The performance has been recreated here with a gibberish, which, tied by a string to one leg, trampled on a chalk circle [...] effectively supplanting the artist. [...]

The exhibition, composed of his older and more recent works, demonstrates the diversity, coherence and importance of Lee Kang-so's approach. [...]

(Translated)