Exhibition Information

			PIBI GALLERY presents the solo exhibition of the geometrical abstract painter Lee Kyo Jun Division from June 4th to July 18th, 2020. Following his first solo show at PIBI Gallery in 2019 that was mainly about the revisiting of his early conceptual installation and photographic works from the 1970’s to the 1980’s, this second exhibition will focus on the lead and aluminum pieces of the 1990’s and the space partition pieces of the early 2000’s that the artist produced under the main themes of “flat surface” and “division,” and examine the essence of Lee’s paintings of the last forty years. 
With the 1979 Daegu Contemporary Art Festival as his starting point, Lee began producing conceptual and experimental installation works, becoming involved with numerous major modern art exhibitions in the Korean art scene of the 70’s and the 80’s including Independants (1981) at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul, Ecole de Seoul (1981), Kwanhoon Gallery, Seoul, five TA.RA group shows including TA.RA Group Exhibition at the Inkong Gallery, Daegu, and the Kwanhoon Gallery, Seoul, etc. Lee began doing flat surface works in the early 1990’s utilizing diverse materials such as lithographic print, charcoal, acrylics, watercolors, etc. and began “dividing” his canvas, then moved on to geometrically split the surface to create geometrical abstract paintings in the latter part of the decade, using plexiglass and metallic materials such as aluminum and lead on canvas. Coming into the millennium, Lee has been continuing the legacy of Korean abstract painting by opting to express the essence of things through minimal composition, form, and color.
In this exhibition, we will see Lee’s creations from the latter 1990’s to the early 2000’s, those in which he divided and split his canvases and cotton ducks using various materials along with aluminum and lead, consisting only the bare minimum of forms and colors. These metallic works are special in that they departed from the artist’s curiosity of the used materials themselves. It began back in 1998 when Lee came across a portion of lead sheet by chance, which he sought to cut into a flat surface with scissors and stick it to plywood using industrial glue. He found the thin lead sheet to be quite a variable material, being able not only to display a diverse grade of brightness based on different temperatures, humidity levels, and production methods, but also give off an alluring feel from the deep spatial impressions made inside, despite being flat, due to its unique opaqueness. The artist’s earlier aluminum works involved cutting aluminum sheets into small pieces that were then attached to a single board, a process that was done not by hand but by proactively using machines to sand the surface, draw grids with a milling machine, and more. In Lee’s lead and aluminum serial works – that result from the simple action of cutting, attaching, and drawing lines – only the flat surfaces and the continuing lines of perpendiculars and horizontals exist on the cold metallic boards, which reveal more precisely what the artist intents to achieve in his paintings.
And through other canvas pieces that followed the two metallic series, it is evident that Lee’s works are his experimentation on the medium of painting, centered on the elements of “flat surface” and “division” that have their roots in his early photographic works that started in the mid 1970’s. They were examples of the artist’s attempt to newly interpret the “flatness” and the “frame” of photographs, as seen in his works where Lee intentionally leaves space outside the frame when developing the photographs of his iron frame and column using installations, or where he accentuates the frame itself as a material via a performance of appearing to lean on the corner of the photo. Later during the early period of when he focused mainly on flat surface works, Lee discovers the “division” element of the canvas by noticing the line where the side and front surface of the canvas meet, as well as the new lines that form when dividing the inner plane area that results from leaving blank the outer boundary of the canvas. Drawn less to color but more towards the geometrical compositions of dots, lines, and planes, the partitioning lines of the flat surface, and the surfaces that come about via the lines of the canvas, Lee continued to divide the canvas through combining numerous possibilities of how all these elements may relate to one another, creating more than a hundred grid works in a year and systematically build his artistic realm. Lee’s works have been about inquiring into surfaces and their partitions, specifically “dividing” his paintings using various materials of lithographic print, charcoal, acrylics, and watercolors in the early 1990’s, incorporating a new way of splitting the screen with such materials of plexiglass, aluminum, lead, and canvas from the end of the 90’s – like the works exhibited in this show – and from the mid 2000’s onwards, diversifying partitions through overlapping various colors and grid layers as in the Windows series, as well as attempting three dimensional divides in the Void series.
The flat surface and division are probably two of the essential elements when it comes to the genre of painting, being the structure of the art form itself as well as the self-defining frame. To Lee, the canvas is not a simple surface. Viewing its outline as a kind of line, and the surface and lines as effectively being independent elements, he attempts to have the frame of the flat surface to be perceived in a whole new way. Journeying through forty years of time, Lee’s contemplation about the outline and frame of the canvas is rendered in the format of a painting and under the subject of “division. “ His efforts in endlessly analyzing and studying the essence of art objectively were his way of returning to the basics of painting, which are revealed through his method of removing the subjective influence of the artist as much as possible while fashioning a reserved image in order to do away with the ranks of composition.
From his earlier geometrical abstract paintings of trying screen division using various types of materials to the strict geometrical abstract versions, Lee has continued his experimentation on the composition of horizontals, intersecting perpendiculars, and flat surfaces, or in other words his examination of meta-paintings, while going through many rather different attempts in format in the process. Lee has made colorful attempts in painting to test the boundaries of the format while firmly maintaining a consistent attitude towards flat surfaces, space, canvas, and painting. Through his works from the latter 1990’s to the early 2000’s, this exhibition will be a meaningful opportunity to revisit the paintings of Lee as well as witness his experimental spirit of art and the identity of his works.