In the 2000s, Lee Kang Wook—an artist who swept the top prizes of all major and prestigious open-call exhibitions held in Korea, earning the title of a “Grand Slam” winner of national competitions—will hold a solo exhibition at Noh Gallery from November 9 (Wed) to November 25 (Fri).
 
After graduating from the Department of Painting at Hongik University and its graduate school, Lee Kang Wook embarked on a distinguished artistic career, receiving the Grand Prize at the ‘The 15th National Grand Fine Art Exhibition’ in 2001, the Donga Art Award at the 2002 ‘Dong-A Art Festival’, the Grand Prize at the 2002 ‘The 24th JoongAng Fine Arts Competition’, and the Support Prize at the 2003 ‘Songeun Art Award’.

Three years ago, he went to the United Kingdom to pursue further studies. This solo exhibition will serve as an opportunity to confirm that his years of study in the UK have led his work toward a deeper and more intricate artistic world.

Lee Kang Wook paints layered landscapes in which microscopic worlds—such as cellular structures visible only through a microscope—overlap with vast worlds like the universe seen through the Hubble Space Telescope. Upon this stratified plane where the ‘microcosm’ and the ‘macrocosm’ intersect, yet another world is added.

This world is one of imagination and illusion, a world that can never be seen through either a microscope or a telescope. Building upon this fundamental structure, the works presented in this exhibition incorporate color and line, transforming the paintings into more vivid and dynamic compositions.

Delicate lines and planes of color float within the canvas space. Circles or ovals, along with rectangles, appear while crossing and interweaving with one another. The forms differ in scale and overlap within the canvas without achieving complete shapes. In another group of works, small oval forms resembling grains proliferate endlessly, evoking abstract yet at the same time organic forms reminiscent of fractal growth in nature.

Color, like these forms, is rendered with such subtlety that it creates the illusion of either penetrating into or escaping from one another. As a result, the works presented in this exhibition convey a noticeably more vibrant impression than his earlier works.

Regarding the works presented by Lee Kang Wook in this exhibition, Sook-Kyung Lee (UK, Curator, Tate Liverpool) comments:

“Whereas the artist’s earlier paintings represented the inscrutable aspects of the universe through a paradoxical dualism, his recent works deserve attention for expressing moments of enlightenment experienced by the artist through the Upanishads—moments in which knowledge of the self is attained within an unknowable universe. Such an interpretation may not be particularly important to the viewer; however, for the artist, who seeks to recognize his place in the world and to communicate this awareness through painting, this can only be a profoundly significant issue.”

References

• 《Invisible Space》