MMCA Seoul revisits Lee Seung-taek's 'non-art'

Installation view of "Lee Seung Taek's Non-Art: The Inversive Act," a retrospective of experimental artist Lee Seung-taek at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), Seoul. Courtesy of MMCA

By Kwon Mee-yoo

"My view was inverted. My thought process was inverted. My life in this world was inverted," artist Lee Seung-taek said.

Lee is a seminal figure in Korean experimental art, known for introducing the concept of "non-sculpture" which defies the established grammar of sculpture. Active since the 1950s, Lee covers diverse genres from painting, photography and sculpture to performance art and land art.

The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), Seoul, presents "Lee Seung Taek's Non-Art: The Inversive Act," a retrospective of Lee centering on the artist's unique aesthetic values which played an important role in transforming Korea's contemporary art scene.

"This exhibition will be an opportunity to revisit Lee's journey of the past six decades, in which he constantly challenged the fixed notion of art," MMCA director Youn Bum-mo said.

Artist Lee Seung-taek poses at his retrospective at MMCA Seoul. Courtesy of MMCA

Lee was born in Gowon, South Hamgyong Province, now in North Korea, in 1932. He moved to the South in 1950 during the Korean War and entered the Department of Sculpture at Hongik University, one of the top art schools in Korea.

The 88-year-old artist said he took an interest in "non-art" in his freshman year in college. "I used unconventional materials such as vinyl and twine, which resulted in a totally different style from traditional sculptures using wood and stone," Lee said.

He challenged the traditional notions of modern sculpture from the West by bringing in unlikely materials for sculpture such as traditional Korean pottery, coal briquettes and glass, which had not been perceived as sculptural materials in the 1960s.

The artworks made from these materials were placed without a plinth, stacked up like a tower or suspended from the ceiling as Lee attempted to create cracks in the established sculptural grammar.

Some of his early works are reproduced for this exhibit, in pursuit of "non-sculpture." "Growth (Tower)" is made of "onggi" (Korean earthenware), and two untitled pieces (1968, 2018) consist of steel framework wrapped with vinyl in primary colors.

In the 1970s, Lee continued to experiment with "non-material elements" such as wind, fire and smoke and presented his "tying" work series, which tied together natural and artificial objects such as stone, pottery and books, shedding light on the inherent meaning and value of objects.

The "tying" method is Lee's attempt to invert the forms and nature of items and subvert familiar everyday experience. Some of the objects are actually tied with twine, while others are engraved with imaginary traces of tying.

Lee Seung-taek's "Untitled" (1974) Courtesy of MMCA

"The language of tying bears some connections with the ethnological experience of tying things with straw rope as seen in Godret Stone but the artist adopts a characteristic ironic approach in which he creates an optical illusion through the inscription of imaginary rope-tying marks on objects to bring about a visual transition or to evoke inferences of objects' hidden aspects and imaginary changes," the exhibit's curator Bae Myung-ji said.

"Hip," a female torso with rope tying marks from his "Tied Woman Body" series, was presented at the National Art Exhibition in 1972. The marks maximize the physicality of suppression of the body in the work that won Lee the Dong-A Art Award in 1978 for the series.

Lee further pursued formless works, which incorporates natural phenomena such as wind, fire and smoke into artwork and does not possess a certain shape and disappears with time. These works are characterized by its amorphous and non-material aspects.

The first formless work was "Untitled (Burning Canvases Floating on the River)" in 1964, which depicted canvases that had been set on fire floating down the Han River.

A monumental piece of this discipline would be "Wind" (1970), which suspended a series of blue fabric pieces with a cord between campus buildings of Hongik University. The flapping installation was later presented at the 11th Sao Paulo Biennial the next year.

"A Play of Tree Mouth" (1968) in Lee's "privatization" series shows how the artist could intervene with an existing environment or structure to create an artwork, without producing anything. This is another approach by Lee to the formless art.

Lee Seung-taek's "Untitled (Burning canvases floating on the River)" (c. 1988) / Courtesy of MMCA

In the mid-1980s, Lee's interest shifted to environment and ecology and created artworks such as "Artist Planting Moss and Greening Campaign (Making Hills Green)" and "Earth Performance" series to convey the message of ecological recovery.

Lee's works from the 1990s shows his aspects as an avant-garde artist and a historian as he brought in society, history and politics to his works as shown in "Last Supper of the Power" and "At Last, Art Has Been Garbage."

Shamanism is an important element of Lee's works as well. At a solo exhibition in 1986, Lee presented red, blue and black clothes and pillars bound with twine hung on the walls. It evoked a shamanistic atmosphere and Lee wrote an essay "Shamanism and Non-Sculpture at the Crossroad" in the exhibition catalogue.

Lee, who believed that the "most ethnological is the most global," frequently used folk items and traditional items such as "jangseung" (totem pole).

Lee Seung-taek's "Wind" (1970/2020) / Courtesy of MMCA

Lee's major installations of the 1970s and 1980s, such as "Wind" and "Land Wearing Roof Tiles," are re-created outside the museum, extending the boundary of sculpture.

Lee's iconic 1970 work "Wind" was restaged between the buildings of MMCA Seoul.

"The movement and the sound of the blue cloth fluttering with the wide-open sky as its backdrop and the perpetually changing form represent the invisible flow of air in the most poetic way, proposing not a fixed form but an ever-changing and generative circumstance as a work of art," the curator said.

"Land Wearing Roof Tiles," first unveiled in 1988, showcases Lee's interest in traditional Korean aesthetics ― giwa tiles in this case. Lee installed roof tiles on the ground as if they embrace the land and humans.

The exhibit runs until March 28, 2021.