Lee Kang So: Where the Wind Meets the Water

The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA; director Kim Sunghee) presents Lee Kang So: Where the Wind Meets the Water from Friday, November 1, 2024, to Sunday, April 13, 2025, at MMCA Seoul. 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 (1011–1077), titled Song of a Clear Night. 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.

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.