The exhibition Lee Kang So: Where the Wind Meets the Water provides a critical reevaluation of the distinctive body of work produced over six decades by Lee Kang So (b. 1943), a seminal figure in the evolution of contemporary Korean art. As a leading artist in the Korean art scene, Lee Kang So has continued to carry out conceptual experimentation regarding the perception and recognition of images. The exhibition title, Where the Wind Meets the Water, was inspired by the work of a Song dynasty Neo-Confucian scholar, Shao Yong (邵雍, 1011–1077), titled Song of a Clear Night (淸夜吟). In his work, Shao Yong metaphorically describes a state of enlightenment upon encountering a new world. Shao Yong’s title encapsulates the oeuvre of Lee Kang So, who has long questioned the many different ways we see the world around us and continued his conceptual experimentation regarding perception in a variety of media such as painting, sculpture, installation, printmaking, video, and photography. Lee’s artistic philosophy is well illustrated in his own words, which he wrote when describing his work exhibited at the 1975 Paris Biennial. It was at that time he stated, “Rather than depicting images through our conventional method, which falls outside the subject-object relationship, I aim to present an open structure that reveals the normally invisible order and relationships within the universe, making these unseen states naturally visible.” (“Participation in the 9th Paris Biennial,” SPACE, January 1976)



In the 1970s, Lee Kang So began his journey into experimental art through his participation in contemporary art movements such as the Shincheje (New System), AG (Korean Avant Garde Association), Seoul Biennale, and Ecole de Séoul. From 1974 to 1979, he, along with a number of fellow artists, organized the Daegu Contemporary Art Festival, where they explored a distinctive philosophical and artistic stance in contemporary Korean art, and one separate from Western art history. In this process, Lee experimented with media like video, printmaking, and events that could subvert the conventional understanding of images. His participation in major international exhibitions, including the 9th Paris Biennial (1975), the 2nd Biennale of Sydney (1976), the 10th International Biennial Exhibition of Prints in Tokyo (1976), and the 14th São Paulo Biennial (1977), showcased his works on a global scale. From the 1980s onwards, Lee shifted his focus to painting, delving into the process of contemplation. This is when he became aware of the constantly changing nature of objects and how different viewers interpret images in varying ways. Since then, he has continued to explore experimental approaches to drawing that deliberately minimize the artist’s intentionality. His works evolved from abstraction in the early 1980s to figurative paintings of houses, boats, ducks, and deer in the late 1980s. Since the 1990s, Lee has moved between abstract and figurative artworks, narrating imaginative realities. This approach has continued with a series of works that began in the 2000s and which skillfully manipulate the boundaries between text and abstraction.



Lee Kang So: Where the Wind Meets the Water is organized around two questions that Lee has been consistently exploring since the 1970s. The first question revolves around the artist’s skepticism concerning his own recognition as a creator and as a subject encountering the world. The exhibition traces the artist’s trajectory of experimenting with intentionally excluding or questioning the act of creation, not only through new media such as video and events but also across various traditional media like painting, printmaking, and sculpture. The second question involves the nature of the objects as viewed by both the artist and viewers. The artist’s critical examination of objective reality and its representation through images began with Disappearance (1973) at the first solo exhibition at Myeongdong Gallery. Since then, Lee has continually interrogated the boundary between the real and the virtual, navigating between text (or work titles), objects, and imagery. Rather than pushing direct theoretical concepts, his methodology offers viewers—both participants and observers—myriad possibilities of perception, thereby opening up infinite possibilities, like a multiverse, not a single universe. At the same time, Lee’s work suggests that there is no single truth within the diverse experiences and memories that shape our world and that everything creates a virtual spacetime within the world they perceive.



Gallery 3

Gallery 3 bridges Lee’s experimental art period with phases of abstract and figurative painting, asking questions about his own perception and act of creation, not only through new media such as video and events but also across a variety of traditional media like painting, printmaking, and sculpture. From the mid-1970s, a time when experimental art was at its peak in Korea, Lee Kang So began unraveling and damaging canvas threads, reflecting on the moment when a raw material (canvas) is transformed into an artwork. Through this process, he questioned the role and limitations of the artist as a creator. These questions persisted even after he encountered new media for the first time at the 1975 Paris Biennial. His video piece Painting 78-1 (1978) and Painting (Event 77-2) (1977), a well-known performance work by the artist himself, demonstrate how painting paradoxically erases the artist’s presence, either through the act of painting itself or by wiping paint from his own body to form an artwork. This effort to erase the artist evolved after his experimental art period, pushing Lee toward a phase of abstract and figurative painting, one in which he either sought to paint by excluding his own intention or to express doubt about the existence of the perceived objects.



In the early 1980s, Lee Kang So focused on printmaking and drawing, embarking on abstract drawing. During his time in the United States, and following the completion of the MoMA PS1 National and International Studio Program (1991-1992), he dedicated himself to drawing, painting, and sculpture. The artist became increasingly skeptical of the idea that viewers interpret artworks according to the creator's intention, leading him to reconsider his approach to painting. This reflection evolved into an artistic stance that acknowledges how the meaning of a work can be understood differently, depending on the viewer’s thoughts, emotions, and memories. Accordingly, the figurative series he began in the late 1980s, featuring motifs such as houses, boats, ducks, and deer, sought to capture the process of change rather than static objects through the use of fluid, lively brushstrokes. While some motifs, like ducks, may carry symbolic associations, Lee deliberately avoids fixing their meanings, leaving space for the viewer’s imagination to take hold. His practice focuses more on the process of creation than the final product, aiming at an open structure where the artwork is completed through the viewer’s interpretation based on their own experiences and perceptions.



Gallery 4

In Gallery 4, visitors explore the body of work by Lee Kang So, who, from his early works to his paintings in the 2000s, questioned the objects we observe and contemplated the relationship between image and reality. In the late 1960s, a movement emerged in the Korean art scene, one led by young artists who wanted to break away from Western modernism centered on painting and sculpture. Influenced by installations, objects, performances, and the anti-art movement of Dada, they aimed to explore new forms of avant-garde art. Against this backdrop, Lee maintained a desire for change, a sense of nihilism toward reality, and a critical perspective on the world, while also remaining interested in the emerging directions of contemporary art as he proceeded to follow through on bold initiatives. He was actively involved in AG, which from its inception adopted—as a practical motto—fundamental exploration of objective reality. Based on advanced contemporary theories, the group pursued intellectual and philosophical exploration, and Lee continued to conduct perception experimentations in a number of different ways. Furthermore, the Daegu Contemporary Art Festival, spearheaded by Lee Kang So between 1974 and 1979, became a significant platform in Korean experimental art, allowing Lee to continuously pursue art movements in an effort to develop a form of contemporary art that could function as a new universal language.



In his artwork Untitled-7522 (1975/remade 2018), Lee Kang So juxtaposes a broken stone with a photograph of the same stone before it was broken, reflecting on the relationship between the real (the stone) and the virtual (the image). This juxtaposition presents the viewer with a situation where—although the actual stone, the photograph of the stone, and the viewer’s mental image of the stone are all referred to as stone—they all inherently differ from one another. For the artist, what was important was not the materiality of the stone, but to evoke that every stone ultimately exists within individual notions by apposing different understandings and images of the stone. Similarly, over several decades, Lee experimented with reproducible media such as printmaking, photography, and video, continuously reproducing the same image while reassigning each copy as an original work. In the process of varying the same image across different media and forms, Lee highlights once again the idea that nothing remains identical and that even the same image or object can be interpreted differently depending on the viewer’s experience, as well as the spatial and temporal context.