ART-PRESENTATION: Lee Sung-Kuen

As part of the France-Korea Year, Lee Sung-Kuen presents his first solo exhibition at Tornabuoni Art Paris. Lee Sung-Kuen was born in Seoul, he has been teaching at the Department of Metal Art & Design of Hong-ik University since 1990. He is also Director of the Cultural Foundation of the National Museum of Korea in Seoul.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Tornabuoni Art Archive

Lee Sung-Kuen’s work take shape in a web of colourful steel wires extremely thin, almost invisible, creating geometric structures, circular or elliptical, delicate and ethereal. His approach to art echoes the ancient delicacy of the inks on paper of the Chinese alphabet, the candour of Japanese ceramics, it is the pursuit of sagacious manual skill, the lowliness of materials that are ordinary, even poor, certainly anything but precious or technological. He describes himself as “I am an installation artist making space design with metal modeling works”. Building a bridge between man and nature, Lee’s work is a perfect illustration of the concept of vital energy, which is omnipresent in the secular artistic culture of Eastern Asia. He creates sculptures of primordial shapes that, at first sight, evoke human cells or the notion of fertility. Made out of entangled steel wires, which the artist sometimes brightens up with vivid colors; they establish a dialogue between fullness and emptiness while sustaining the resonance of their initial role. Once suspended in air, the vibrating play of light on the sculptures, and the apparent fusion with their surroundings into one symbiotic unity, bring the ovoid shapes to life. The inner core of Lee SungKuen’s artworks can be resumed by: Human + Love + Light.

Info: Galerie Tornabuoni Art, 16 Avenue Matignon, Paris, Duration: 1/7-10/9/16, Days & Hours: 10:30-18:30, www.tornabuoniart.fr