One of the most frequently brought-up talking points when discussing Lee Kwang-Ho’s artistry is whether the works should be classified as craft characterized by utility or fine art that lays its foundation on ideas. The spectator’s perspective is what determines the instant identity of the artwork, as they find the works to be utilized or appreciated the moment they encounter the pieces. The works require full attentiveness in order to achieve the unique formality Lee pursues. Lee contemplates the materiality of the substance used through his meticulous hand labor. Yet the artist presents his works as part of a spectrum that lacks a clear-cut definition of its purpose, instead of endowing them with a category. Lee’s bodily senses continue to work along familiar patterns of movement, but the finished product does not conform to craft conventions. It becomes an object with an unspecified purpose, posing a question of its existence to the audience.
It is natural for those living in modern times who have never experienced life before the Industrial Revolution to be intrigued by non-mechanical methods of production rather than deeming them obsolete. Thus, the handcrafted nature of Lee’s work fulfills a desire to construct personal sensations and emotional narratives that are independent of social norms generated by industrialized institutions. After the Korean War, South Korea, having become the most impoverished nation in the world, was unlikely to have resources in any form. It is only in the 21st century that Seoul’s—and a number of other Korean cities’—collective chaos has begun to take on its identity as a modern community, overlaid with human capital, the only national asset, and the influx of foreign cultural capital, and has begun to establish a unique aesthetic identity for our city. During this period, radical developments in information and communication, including the spread of the Internet, led to the delocalization of aesthetic styles around the world. There is no doubt that cultures with inherently diverse traditions began to mass-produce generic, unified forms of manufactured goods, mainly standardized in the United States and Europe; thus, contemporary sensibilities were perceived as Western. Amidst such a current of internationalized aesthetics and the affected trend of Korean contemporary art, Lee grew up with his grandparents, who used to twist rice straw into threads to make everyday tools. He was able to fully embody the virtue of patient handwork and traditional Korean techniques such as lacquer, cloisonné, and braiding.
Born in 1981, Lee Kwang-Ho turned twenty in 1999, coincidentally at a time when there were rumors that computers operating in the binary system would fail to recognize the year 2000 and cause a massive explosion that would bring an apocalypse. Lee, who shaped his artistic outlook during the transition from the apparent analog era to the digital century, expresses the indigenous techniques that permeate his fingers and the perspective of a modern youth who naturally accepts the leap into a new era. Lee’s craft sophistication and the contemporary aesthetic that coexists with it challenge the anti-crafts sentiment in the West, especially in European and American societies, and attempt to deconstruct the modern art genre.
Since the surge of abstract art in the early 20th century and the following creation of white-cube gallery spaces, the distinction between craft, design, and fine art holds minimal significance. The Bauhaus, the iconic art school which produced many of the masters of modern design and continues to influence the way contemporary artists work up until today, asserted that artworks should be displayed against blank, off-white walls to eliminate any distractions. Entering a white-cube gallery space that seals off contact with external factors, the subject of thought and feeling becomes the spectator. In the three-dimensional space that blasts out its silence, the exhibited objects pierce out and resonate in the air. The 2020 Lee Kwang-Ho solo exhibition in collaboration with Leeahn Gallery Seoul, Composition in Blue, is a venue for an aesthetic experience constructed by adding a touch of Lee’s “intended improvisation” to the spatial characteristics of the white-cube form. It is to be seen as a composition that deliberately adjusts where each object should be placed, in consideration of the size, structure, and physical obstacles of the gallery setting. From such alignment, the object’s function retreats from the viewer’s mind. As the practical agenda is veiled upon its appreciation, those matters named stool, lighting, and shelves disclose their innate materiality and formality.
Occupying one wall in a grid arrangement, the 32 cubic objects have one or two grate-like structures projecting from the blue cloisonné surface that the viewer faces from the front. Perpendicular to the horizontal lines of the ceiling and floor, a few of these straight lines are centered in the square, others are lopsided, and the rest are balanced on either side. The artist likens the pieces to the phenomenon of an object being bathed in blue light at dawn, providing a different sentiment from that at midday under dazzling sunlight. In terms of fixing the movement of light on the surface of the work, it shares some similarities with Claude Monet’s Rouen Cathedral series, which captured the scene of natural light rays traveling through an architectural structure. As the 19th-century Impressionist masterpieces, characterized as flat paintings, are internally enveloped by Lee’s copper objects within the viewer’s mind, the physicality of the materials is accentuated in Lee’s works. In this case, the entirety of the exhibition space is conflated with the canvas frame, and once the installation is complete, the arrangement of objects, devoid of fluidity, remains in place, radiating a sharp cobalt blue color. The carefully organized composition is the work of the artist, but the spectator and the position of the light make a difference.
Surrounded by Lee Kwang-Ho’s blue works, the observer is placed in a state where it is difficult to detect any wavelength of light other than blue. The exhibition, which shrinks infinitely against an all-white backdrop, creates the illusion of a pulsating blue color. In it, art—whatever its form—becomes incapable of organic interaction with the outside world and can only vibrate with its own aesthetic aura. The audience’s self-consciousness is heightened in the confrontation between the artwork and the viewer, where other beings and ideas cannot intervene. The viewer becomes a participant in the newly raised ideology from within, becoming a part of the artwork instead of wandering around it. At this point, the audience no longer perceives the objects as something segregated from one’s mind and bound to their useful purpose, but incorporates them into the self, catalyzing active cogitation and evidencing the significance an installation site holds.
If one were to inquire where Lee’s work falls between aesthetic value and practicality, between art, craft, and design, it would be purely an internal value judgment of the viewer, not something that his work decides for itself. The object is speechless. If aesthetic values are the source of light, the audience becomes a prism, refracting and scattering the social utility of aesthetics at different angles of incidence. Only when the viewer crosses the threshold of thinking beyond judgmental notions can they “sense” the artwork rather than “observe” it. From a reductionist perspective that represents the general theory of modern Western art, the audience visiting museums and galleries is reduced to the bodily organ of the eye. The willingness to perceive and further experience the work’s production method and the artist’s personal ideology, rather than just a passive view of visual pleasure, reveals an ecological and holistic ethos that recognizes the interaction of the individual with all points of contact, rather than a parallel relationship between creator and viewer.
The viewer’s non-visual experience of Lee’s work is dominated by a secondhand sense of manual labor. This catalog, published in collaboration with Leeahn Gallery and Lee Kwang-Ho, presents seven series manifesting such sensory experiences. To begin with, there are Obsession, Beyond the Inevitable, and Antifragile, which are continuations derived from his signature series Knots, involving the act of “weaving” materials by hand. In addition, by applying heat to copper using a ceramic kiln, the artist has produced a variety of works that involve painstaking manual labor, such as the Shape of a River series, which oxidizes copper plates to generate a rainbow glow; the Enameled Copper series, illuminating vibrant colors by applying lacquer and cloisonné; and the EPS series, in which he draws curved lines on Styrofoam with a hot wire, bringing about a feather-light quality. The exhibition Composition in Blue is composed of a versatile range of works that fuse knots, copper, cloisonné, and other working methods.
As observed from the listed series, Lee’s works are compilations of “intensive hand labor,” which is identified with the production of craft. However, where the resulting works fall on the spectrum between craft, design, and fine art is determined not by how the objects are made, but by the composition of the installation, the characteristics of the exhibition space, and the users of the venue. One certain reflection is that, unlike crafts, which are made with a purpose and perform a limited function in a fixed location, and design products, which, with the progress of modernization, easily replace the physical labor required for craftwork by means of “standardization,” Lee’s work has no clear starting motive, and it emerges as an object through the rhythm of hand labor and the physicality of materials that occur in his unconsciousness. However, the artist’s view of his work, which does not restrict its use to being an object of gaze, such as painting or sculpture in traditional discourse, but traverses between the ambivalent values of aesthetics and practicality, proves its raison d’être by creating a longed-for ideological and practical convergence in 21st-century art discourse, which is saturated to the point where there are no new concepts to be presented anymore.
Originally written for Lee Kwang-Ho’s publication at Leeahn Gallery, 2023.
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