From fields to fire: Lee Bae brings 30 years of charcoal art to Museum SAN

Artist Lee Bae speaks about his solo exhibition “En attendant” during a press conference at Museum SAN in Wonju, Gangwon Province, Monday. Korea Times photo by Lee Hae-rin

WONJU, Gangwon Province — Standing at the summit of a museum he likens to a “modern monastery,” artist Lee Bae returned to his roots as a Korean farmer’s son and a restless traveler in a new solo exhibition at Museum SAN that meditates on disaster, renewal and the active work of waiting.

Titled “En attendant,” the exhibition runs from Tuesday to Dec. 6 and transforms the entire museum into a single journey that threads through indoor galleries and outdoor sculpture fields, echoing the institution’s founding trinity of “Space, Art, Nature.” It is the first time the museum has devoted its full grounds to a solo show of Korean artist’s works, surveying more than three decades of Lee’s painting, sculpture, installation and video, centered on charcoal as his signature medium.

For Lee, who left his hometown of Cheongdo, North Gyeongsang Province, for Paris in 1989 and has lived “like a wanderer for 40 years,” the project became a journey back to his origins.

“Preparing this exhibition, I kept asking myself, ‘Who am I, in what environment did I grow up and what did I dream of as an artist?’” he said during a press preview at the museum, Monday. “Deep down, I am a son of a farmer and this was a time to reaffirm that root.”

Lee Bae sweeps a broom through soil brought from his hometown of Cheongdo in front of “Becoming,” a 9-meter-high installation that projects his brushwork on rice paddies, before a press conference for his solo exhibition “En attendant” at Museum SAN in Wonju, Gangwon Province, Monday. Newsis

His late father, a farmer who had wanted his eldest to inherit the family orchard rather than pursue a career in art, is a quiet but persistent presence in the show. Lee recalled the “emptiness” his father felt over who would care for the land, a memory that now informs the artist’s view of labor, soil and the long, slow cycles that go into making his favorite medium.

Charcoal first entered his work in Paris in 1990, not as a lofty metaphor but as a practical solution when he could not afford paint. As he sketched with barbecue charcoal from the supermarket, he began to understand it as a bridge to the ink painting world he had left behind.

“I came from a culture where we paint green bamboo and blue orchids in black,” he said, referring to Korean traditional ink paintings. “Charcoal allowed me to put that cultural world and imagination into a single material.”

After being confronted in Paris with what he saw as the Western art world’s limited understanding of ink painting, calligraphy and other East Asian art traditions, Lee has held onto charcoal for three decades as a simple medium through which he could quietly guide outsiders to that cultural lineage.

Over time, charcoal has become for Lee what he calls a “medium of mentality,” charged with Korean folk beliefs around purification and protection — and increasingly with his anxiety over environmental disasters.

Lee Bae's charcoal sculpture "Issu du feu" stands at Museum SAN's entrance in Wonju, Gangwon Province, Monday. Newsis

The monumental 8-meter tall charcoal sculpture “Issu du feu (From Fire)” at the museum entrance shows that concern. Lee said the work was shaped in part by witnessing large wildfires in Gangwon Province and Spain.

“As I stacked each block, I was making a wish that such fires would not return,” he said, calling the towering charcoal form “almost a totem” erected with collective wishes for healing.

The show unfolds through six zones, inviting visitors to experience how the works change as light and seasons shift at the museum, which was designed by Japanese architect Tadao Ando.

In the lobby, 16 works from his “Brushstroke” series create a corridor of sweeping, gestural marks that shift with natural daylight.

Works from Lee Bae's "Brushstroke" series stand at Museum SAN in Wonju, Gangwon Province, Monday. Newsis

There are also “White” and “Black” rooms, featuring Lee's tactile visual language of paper, ink, charcoal blocks and floor drawings. Black, he emphasized, is not merely a color but “a depth that contains all colors and possibilities,” while white holds light, openness and the space of yet-to-be-formed images.

Lee’s identity as a farmer’s son surfaces most explicitly in “Becoming,” an installation that merges a 9-meter-high projection of his brushwork on rice paddies with an earth platform built from soil from his hometown of Cheongdo. Plants will grow there over the course of the exhibition, turning the gallery into a living field.

The exhibition's title, “En attendant,” borrows the French phrase for “waiting” but, for Lee, it means a state of active uncertainty rather than passive delay.

“Waiting, for me, is not sitting there with nothing to do,” he said. “It’s a time when something is incomplete, when you feel lack and regret but keep trying to become more sincere and pure as an artist.” He admitted spending more than a year in “darkness and despair” while preparing the show, questioning whether he truly understood art before arriving at the title as a distillation of that inner process.

“En attendant” runs from Tuesday through Dec. 6 at Museum SAN.

Lee Bae's "Black"/ Courtesy of Museum SAN