View of Sang Nam Lee’s solo exhibition “Forme d’esprit” at Perrotin Seoul, 2024. Photo: CJY Studio. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.Perrotin Seoul is pleased to present “Forme d’esprit”, a solo exhibition by Sang Nam Lee, an artist who has been working in New York since 1981. Showcasing 13 works that span the artist’s career from the 1990s to 2023, the exhibition will explore Lee’s unique geometric and abstract language accumulated over four decades of artistic oeuvre.
Participating in major exhibitions at Korea and abroad, including the Daegu Contemporary Art Festival and the São Paulo Biennale in the 1970s, Lee continued to experiment and pose theoretical questions about painting. In 1981, He departed to New York, where he explores his own artistic language until the mid-1990s. The form of Lee’s images from these early New York years will strike those acculturated to the reproducibility of painting as foreign, a set of alien signs. These signs gradually evolve and begin to dislocate, twist, overlap, and expand in new relationships with the space around them. “I touch the line between modernism and postmodernism, rationality and irrationality, analog and digital, painting and architecture, art and design. I live in between. Painting makes everything possible. It can hold everything,” Lee said, explaining his work as a constant relationship that breaks away from the fixed meaning of painting.
His work can be formally called ‘geometric abstraction’, but at the same time, the artist deliberately rejects the legibility and ideographic representation of images, avoids reproducing specific objects, and adopts a way of thinking that negates our existing perceptions, stereotypes, and traditions. Thus, his works can be described as ‘landscape paintings of minds,’ depicting the landscapes of the cities and places where he has lived, as well as the trajectory and journey of his life. The title of this exhibition, ‘Forme d’esprit’, shows that the forms and signs of Lee’s images are not unrelated to the journey, trajectory, and spirit of the mind.
Throughout the 1970s, Sang Nam Lee (b. 1953, Seoul) actively participated in major exhibitions, including Daegu Contemporary Art Festival in Daegu, “A Facet of Contemporary Art” at Central Museum of Art in Tokyo, and São Paulo Biennale. In 1981, He departed to New York, where he explores his own artistic language. Lee’s large-scale wall paintings are permanently installed at public institutions such as Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art (2010) and Poznan airport in Poland (2012), and Embassy of Republic of Korea in Japan (2013). He has participated in group exhibition including the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) in Korea; Seoul National University Museum of Art, Seoul; Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C.
