Influential Korean artist Lee Kang-So joins Thaddaeus Ropac.
Portrait of Lee Kang-So, 2021. Photo by Park Chan Woo. © Lee Kang-So/Lee Kang So Zagupsil. Courtesy of Thaddaeus Ropac gallery, London • Paris • Salzburg • Seoul.
Lee Kang-So, a celebrated Korean painter, sculptor, and performance artist, has joined the roster at Thaddaeus Ropac. His first solo exhibition with the gallery is scheduled for spring 2025 in Seoul, where the gallery first opened a location in 2021. Prior to this exhibition, Lee’s work will be featured in a solo show, “Where the Wind Meets the Water,” at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA) in Seoul this fall A selection of Lee’s works went on view at the MMCA’s Seoul Box this week, in time for the start of Seoul Art Week. The full exhibition is slated to open on November 1st.
Born in 1943 in Daegu, Korea, Lee studied painting at the Seoul National University of Art, graduating with a BFA in 1965. In the decade following, he gradually established himself through innovative performances and installations such as Disappearance (1973), in which the artist transformed Seoul’s Myondong Gallery into a functioning bar for a week. During these early years, Lee hoped to foster the arts outside the city centers across Korea, and helped to establish the Daegu Contemporary Art Festival in 1974.
Lee Kang-So, The Wind Blows-240533, 2024. © Lee Kang-So/Lee Kang So Zagupsil. Courtesy of Thaddaeus Ropac gallery, London • Paris • Salzburg • Seoul.
In 1975, his participation in the 9th Paris Biennale and his first institutional exhibition, held at Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris, solidified his international presence. Lee’s work, often associated with the Korean philosophy of pungryu, an ideology based on the idea of letting life flow naturally and literally translating to “flowing like the wind,” deals directly with the notion of harmony in the universe.
Lee began to focus more on his paintings in the 1980s, working with canvas instead of traditional Korean rice paper and ink. His work from this period features expressive, pared-back monochromatic compositions that evoke the aesthetic principles of East Asian literati landscape traditions, which emphasized personal expression over technical skill. At the same time, these paintings gesture towards Western minimalism, focusing on simplicity and abstraction through large, singular strokes.
Currently living and working in Anseong, South Korea, Lee is working on his ongoing “Serenity” series, in which his brushstrokes are influenced by the rhythms of his breathing patterns. In recent years, his work has been the subject of several solo exhibitions across the world, including Gallery Hyundai in Seoul, MASSIMODECARLO in Paris, and Palazzo Caboto in Venice.
“From his earliest groundbreaking performances in the 1970s through to his current practice, he has established a new visual lexicon to interrogate the very praxes of painting and sculpture,” said gallery founder Thaddaeus Ropac.
