Born in 1956 in Cheongdo (
South Korea), Lee Bae lives and works between Paris and Seoul. Lee Bae's monochromatic practice is a formal and immersive journey into the abysses of blackness. Subtly blurring the lines between drawing, painting, sculpture, and installation, he has developed his abstract aesthetics across categories to imbue the noncolor with tangible depth and intensity. Until the early-2000s, he worked exclusively with raw charcoal to create minimal, refined, mosaic-like assemblages of charred wooden shards or chunks on canvas, as well as larger sculptural arrangements of carbonized trunks. Charcoal, obtained by burning wood and used to revive fire, offers a powerful metaphor for the cycle of life that has further inspired him to expand his exploration to include the fourth dimension of time. While he has moved on to solely working with carbon black, a substance close to soot, Lee Bae's latest series of pictorial works crystallizes random elemental gestures, which he practices beforehand with India ink on paper, into thick layers of translucent acrylic medium resembling wax.
