INTERVIEW The rebel returns: Lee Kun-yong and art of letting body speak

Artist Lee Kun-yong in his home studio in central Seoul, Jan. 29 / Courtesy of Kim Jung-han

By Park Han-sol

• Published Feb 3, 2026 1:29 PM KST
• Updated Feb 4, 2026 8:45 PM KST

The pairing of slicked-back white hair and a childlike grin has rarely suited anyone as well as it does Lee Kun-yong.

On a wintry January afternoon, the 83-year-old sat in the living room of his Seoul home, leafing through memories that stretched back more than half a century.

Our meeting came just a week before the opening of his latest solo exhibition at Pace Gallery Seoul, “Body as Thought,” a show intended to gather key archival traces from his 50-year career at the frontier of Korea’s avant-garde experimental art.

But Lee, like all good storytellers, was never content to stay on a single subject. The whole conversation unfolded as if a floodgate of stories had been thrown open. Names and scenes from decades past surfaced with startling clarity and before we realized it, two hours had slipped by.

That habit of refusing the obvious has shaped Lee’s path from early on. In 1963, during the entrance exam for Hongik University’s art school, one of Korea’s most prestigious programs, applicants were instructed to sketch a plaster cast of Apollo. Everyone rushed to secure a seat with a clear frontal view, but Lee arrived too late. With nowhere left to sit, he settled behind the statue and began drawing the back of the Greek god’s head.

Partway through the exam, Kim Whanki — the department head at the time and one of the country’s most formidable abstractionists — stopped to ask his choice of seating. Unwilling to admit the boring truth, Lee replied that he simply wanted to try something different.

The artist still remembers what Kim told his colleague: “Keep an eye on him. He’ll be worth watching.”

True to Kim’s words, that defiant instinct followed Lee into the 1970s. It was a decade marked by martial law and the tightening grip of Park Chung-hee’s authoritarian rule, a climate that left little room for civil liberties and freedom of expression.

One early flashpoint was his repeated clashes with the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA). Lee was among the first to rupture the institution’s scrubbed, orderly interiors with unruly materials — a provocation that was enough to mark him, in the eyes of the state, as a dissident.

In 1971, he attempted to haul an entire tree into the gallery, its roots exposed and clotted with soil. “It had been torn from the ground during the construction of Gyeongbu Expressway,” the artist told The Korea Times.

The gesture was blunt and physical: to drag the outside in, to ask what could count as art and what a museum was willing to contain.

Administrators, however, did not see an artwork; they saw a threat. At the time, MMCA sat within the grounds of Gyeongbok Palace, only minutes from Cheong Wa Dae. What, they asked, might be hidden inside that mass of earth? Who was to say it wasn’t rigged to detonate toward the presidential residence?

City officials demanded the piece be dismantled before it could even enter the building. The young artist refused. “Why on earth would I try to blow up the presidential office, of all places? This was about my art. I kicked up a huge fuss, arguing my case right there for hours until they finally got sick of hearing me,” he recalled with a chuckle.

In the end, they relented. The work, now known as “Corporal Term,” made it into the state-run museum after all.

But that reprieve was short-lived.

As Lee and his peers began turning toward performance, using ordinary bodily actions to probe the fraught relationship between the individual and state power, the institution’s tolerance quickly wore thin. In 1975, he received a formal notice bearing the museum director’s signature: “Pseudo-art masquerading as the avant-garde is to be strictly prohibited.”

It was an unmistakable act of censorship. Yet the public hardly batted an eye. At the time, there was no market for experimental art, nor much patience for it. Such work was not treated as culture worthy of the arts pages, but as sensational disruption — evidence of wayward youth rather than any philosophical intent.

The artist carried on nontheless. That persistence eventually drew the attention of the Agency for National Security Planning, where he was taken in and tortured: forced to kneel with a wooden plank wedged between his calves and hips, his thighs pinned beneath officials’ boots. The damage lingered. For nearly a decade, he walked with a limp.

Fast-forward four decades. Lee returned to the very same museum in 2023 — this time not as a troublemaker on a watch list, but as an artist invited to perform his signature piece, “Snail’s Gallop,” before an attentive crowd and a ring of cameras.

Lowering himself into a crouch, he began inching forward across the long rubber mat. With one hand, he dragged short white chalk lines across the surface; with the soles of his bare feet, he rubbed over them, blurring and erasing what he had just made. Like a snail leaving a trace of its own passage, his progress was visible only in what remained on the floor.

Drawing and erasing became inseparable, part of the same physical labor. The action revealed how art comes into being: through repetition and time, measured by the body moving through space. Rather than explaining this in theory, he chose to enact it, step by step, line by line.

The performance was part of the museum’s 2023 headline exhibition, “Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s-1970s,” which traveled to the Guggenheim in New York and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.

That same year, he performed “Snail’s Gallop” again at the Guggenheim. After his stint, he recalled, a middle-aged man in the audience blurted out, half in disbelief: “Where have you been hiding all this time?”

“I just laughed,” he said. “I told him, I wasn’t hiding at all. You were just late.”

'Bodyscape' and performance

Across paintings and drawings made through simple physical acts, Lee has traced what the body can and cannot do for decades. Sometimes he stands with his back or side to the canvas; sometimes he positions himself behind it altogether. Reaching only as far as his arm allows, he lets the limits of his posture determine each brushstroke.

The resulting works are not images conceived in advance, but records of movement and constraint unfolding in real time — lines generated by the body as it meets the world. Seen without this context, some of the forms are reminiscent of hearts, wings or snow angels, a resemblance that has earned Lee the nickname “the heart painter” among Korean collectors.

Yet the ground beneath these paintings is performance, or what Lee has long called “Event-Logical.” Those early actions, preserved through photographs, video footage and the artist’s own detailed instructions and notes, form the core of his solo show at Pace, fittingly titled “Body as Thought.”

In these performances, everyday acts like eating biscuits, striking a match or drawing a circle on the ground were never spontaneous. Each was carried out according to a precise internal logic and a carefully laid-out sequence. That structure is what set Lee’s work apart from the improvised “happenings” of the era.

By placing familiar gestures inside a rigid framework, he slowed them down and isolated them, forcing viewers to notice how even the smallest movements occupy space and leave consequences behind.

He never set out to make explicitly political statements. But his sustained testing of bodily limits was inevitably read through the conditions of the time — as a quiet challenge to the military dictatorship of the 1970s and ’80s, when even the most mundane gestures were subject to control.

“At the time, I felt my body couldn’t move freely within the boundaries set by society or power,” Lee said. “Performance became a way to push back. But instead of people saying, ‘This feels uncomfortable, but it’s art,’ the reaction was often, ‘This has to be censored and shut down.’”

Paradoxically, he says he didn’t mind being misunderstood. In fact, he welcomed it.

“Being misunderstood is what made my life feel worth living,” he said. “If everyone had completely accepted what I was doing, there would have been no tension at all. And it was that tension that kept pushing me to look for new ways of thinking.”

The Seoul exhibition features video documentation of “Same Area” and “Indoor Measurement,” both performed in 1975. These formative pieces begin with deceptively simple rules — measuring the dimensions of a given space — and unfold through repetitive actions, such as folding and unfolding paper or cutting and reconnecting strips of tape.

Also on view are photographic prints of performances like “The Biscuit Eating” (1977), “Drinking Water” (1975) and “Logic of the Hand 3” (1975), some of which are presented publicly for the first time.

What makes the show particularly striking is where it chooses to place its weight. Rather than foregrounding the body paintings long sought after in the art market, it shifts its attention to the performances and the logic that underpins them — elements previously glimpsed only in fragments across different exhibitions.

That emphasis is reinforced by the step-by-step instructions Lee wrote for each work, displayed alongside the photographs, which reveal that these actions were never improvised but carefully worked out from the outset.

“The Biscuit Eating,” for instance, unfolds in 12 distinct stages. It begins simply enough: the performer sits at a desk and reaches for a biscuit placed before him. Gradually, a wooden plank is strapped to his wrist and bound with bandages, restricting the movement of his arm. As the elbow stiffens, the simple act of lifting food to the mouth becomes clumsy, then nearly impossible. In the final moments, the performer is reduced to dropping the biscuit onto his face, trying to catch it with his mouth — most of the time failing, as it bounces off his cheeks and falls away.

“Past exhibitions tended to focus heavily on my body drawings,” Lee said. “Here, instead of stopping there, viewers can see the aspects of my practice that haven’t really been shown in Korean galleries before. For me, it’s a chance to finally see my oeuvre as a whole.”

At 83, putting the body front and center is no small physical feat. But Lee insists that this, too, is part of the pleasure.

“When my hands tremble and my strength runs out, when those awkward, uneven marks show up, that’s exactly when an interesting work finally begins.”