This is the first comprehensive monograph on the pioneer of Korean avant-garde, Seung-taek Lee.
Seung-taek Lee was born in 1932 in Gowon, Hamgyeongnam-do (currently a province in North Korea). Part of a generation that was deeply affected by the Korean War, he was exposed to works by Russian Constructivist and Realist artists at school and was trained in realistic depiction. As a refugee settled in Seoul, his determination to be an artist of the time was super-ordinary, exploring the possibilities of formless art or site-specific installation works in the 1960s, when no such concept had yet been introduced to the Korean art scene.
Lee is best known for his “bound” series of object-based three-dimensional works and his “wind” series of ephemeral performances. Much of Lee’s paintings, sculptures, and environmental interventions share a kinship with both American land art and Korean shamanic traditions, and they embrace chance and ephemerality in their attempts to form a collaborative partnership with natural phenomena such as fire, water, wind, and smoke. Much of his work is rooted in folklore and has thus utilized traditional objects or natural materials such as tree branches, hanji paper, stones, rope, and wire transformed in almost metaphysical ways.
Beautifully showcased in this seminal book, Lee’s iconic works have been selected under two separate themes: (Un) bound and Non-material, spanning 70 years of Lee’s oeuvre in two separate volumes in a slipcase binding.