Lee Bae: Syzygy by Marc Mayer

Lee Bae’s art has an alchemical dimension that might be familiar to students of medieval cosmology, or natural philosophy. The magic happens early in our encounter with his work. Rather than turn base metal into precious gold—which alchemists never achieved—the artist presents us with an equally thrilling luxury: charcoal. 

Lee Bae’s achievement is all the more impressive for not altering the properties of charcoal to effect its transformation—on the contrary, he takes us deeper into its ontology, deeper into the essence of a material created by fire. In a further ritual of purification—this one aesthetic—Lee helps carbonised wood transform itself again into art—not as its subservient medium, but as the thing itself. 

His isn’t a transubstantiation in the physical sense—Lee’s discreet hands do not alter charcoal’s properties. Rather, his efforts transform us—by altering our experience of the material and by expanding our understanding of its nature. More cultural than physical, Lee’s alchemy befits his profession, and his position in art history. Despite deep roots in Korean cultural traditions, Lee Bae’s magic is unimpeachably contemporary.  

Born in 1956 in Cheongdo, a rural county roughly 320 kilometres south of Seoul, Lee took his MFA from Seoul’s Hongik University in 1986. He studied there with the late Park Seo-bo, Dean of the school’s esteemed College of Fine Art. Known in international circles as the “Father of Korean contemporary art,” Park is a central figure of the Dansaekhwa movement (the word means “monochrome painting”). Dansaekhwa reached its apogee in the 1970s but the austere sensibility still thrives on the international scene. The succeeding generation—of which Lee Bae is the leading exponent—renews it for our time.  

Having spent formative years with Park, Lee moved to Paris in 1990 where he assisted the other key figure of Korean reductivism, Lee Ufan. Issued from the same generation as the late Park, Lee Ufan bridges the Dansaekhwa scene with Japanese Mono-ha. In fact, with his background in philosophy, Lee Ufan is the principal theorist of Mono-ha, and among its key artists. The term translates as “School of Things,” a name it took from a critic’s sarcasm. Although he is Korean, the museum dedicated to Lee Ufan’s legacy is in Japan. But he has long been based in Paris; so has Lee Bae whose work is the beneficiary of this triangulation of cultures. 

Just as it did for Lee Ufan in 1990, in 2018 the government of France knighted Lee Bae as a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. 

For North Americans, it is tempting to equate Lee Bae’s work—along with that of his mentors—to a variation of minimalism. We must be careful, though, because the similarity is superficial. If any Western scene has had an impact on these artists, it would be the French, rather than the American—via tachisme, art informel, Supports/Surfaces, Nouveau Réalisme, and especially for the philosophical Lee Ufan, phenomenology. This cross-cultural encounter notwithstanding, the justification for Korean reductivism remains fundamentally East Asian. It is informed by ancient Daoist ideas such as wu wei, “non-action” or “effortless action.” More specifically, Lee Bae’s use of charcoal exemplifies the Korean aesthetics of mu, “non-being” or “emptiness” as a pregnant space of possibility; and yeong, the spiritual vitality that can inhabit form when the artist gets out of its way. 

It’s true that artists share the same zeitgeist, but it is not true that they share the same perspective. Artistic ideas may well be promiscuous and oblivious to borders, but Eastern reductivism has its own spirit. The Western tradition is a sequence of cleavages, generally speaking—a dynamic of abandonment, a ritual shedding of old ways. Minimalism, too, follows the pattern of breaks and refusals. In East Asia, on the other hand, the justification for change has emerged from an engagement with aesthetic motivations that transcend time: not an escape from the past—in Lee Bae’s case at any rate—but a continuity achieved through refinement and a renewed meditation on the nature of ‘things.’ 

Unlike Western artists of his generation who tend to blur their vocational lineage, Lee Bae’s work makes his lineage transparent, but not through reiteration. His originality in the context of his teachers reflects the Korean concept of beop, the idea that the proper way to absorb a method or tradition is to internalise it, rather than practice imitation. Lee deepens and extends the material inquiry and spiritual commitment of Dansaekhwa into a new register—personal and original, but grounded in a shared ethos.
Lee exemplifies this ethos vividly in the calligraphic works. Pulverised charcoal is turned into ink that he applies with a broad brush on room-embracing scrolls. Great lengths of hanji— traditional Korean mulberry paper—are the support for a sequence of brushstrokes attached like strung beads rather than character sets. Each stroke adds its length to a contiguous collection—we might also call it a sentence, or a phrase—to join other unique records of duration. The strokes have their own subtle features—density, etiolation, curvature, wetness, length—but all are meditative instances of the same thing. 

Like a photograph, each brushstroke registers a repeated but unique occurrence in space and time. That is its only purpose, aside from our pleasure. But the finished drawings are the opposite of photographs—practiced and repeatedly rehearsed, they record a performance rather than capture a slice of life. 

The extreme contrast between the whiteness of the paper and the blackness of the ink invests these works with a forensic lucidity: evidence of life and not much more. Despite Lee’s refusal to represent here—he has been happy to elsewhere, notably in 2000 with his exquisite drawings of persimmons—the context of this work remains resolutely calligraphic; we can’t account for it otherwise. But unlike a calligrapher, Lee’s marks don’t represent words or ideas; they align more with the cadence of speech, measured in breaths. The hand speaks for the mouth. 

The principal sense of the word ‘syzygy’, the exhibition’s resonant title, is ‘alignment’ or ‘union.’ In both astrology and astronomy, it refers to the alignment of celestial bodies, such as in an eclipse when the Sun, the Moon, and the Earth line up, one behind the other. For poets, it suggests pairing or mirroring—metrical feet joined in rhythm, or meaning echoed in sound. For Carl Jung it is the archetypal union of opposites, the integration of anima and animus into a psychic whole. In philosophy and the cosmology of the alchemists, syzygy structures the universe through sacred unions: spirit and matter, darkness and light, being and nothingness.

Enlisting syzygy, Lee Bae extends his poetics of charcoal into the third dimension with bronze sculptures that seem to have grown, alchemically, from the asemic calligraphy on the walls next to them. That’s because they have. Using the contemporary tools, Lee Bae turns his brushstrokes into sculptures, named for their source and reference. The Brushtrokes bronzes double his magic by giving the impression that we are looking at the wooden beams he charred and crushed to make the calligraphic ink. Paradoxically, he closes the circle of carbon by escaping into a material of representation external to it. 

The same linearity qualifies both the paintings and the sculptures—the linearity of time and of movement—while alignment, or syzygy, is their organising principle. The sculptures are shapes without meaning, but rich with the same emotional power as the abstract lines of which they are a transubstantiation. Both the paintings and the sculptures were made of materials transformed by fire and articulated into art: skeleton-keys to open an infinity of metaphorical doors.