《Seung-taek Lee: At the Edge of Sculpture》, currently on view at SOMA Museum of Art, is a large-scale exhibition that surveys the artistic world of Seung-taek Lee, a pioneering figure in Korean experimental art.
 
The exhibition runs from April 10 to July 26, 2026, across Exhibition Halls 1–5 of SOMA Museum of Art Building 1 and the Olympic Sculpture Park. It presents more than 200 works and archival materials, including sculptures, installations, photo-pictures, drawings, objects, and archival documents dating from the 1950s to the present. The exhibition is also significant as the first major solo exhibition by a living artist to encompass both SOMA Museum of Art Building 1 and the Olympic Sculpture Park.

The Art-Historical Significance of the Exhibition
 
This exhibition cannot be understood simply as a retrospective that organizes the work of a senior Korean artist. Rather, through Lee’s practice, it asks again how sculpture has expanded since the latter half of the twentieth century into questions of material, form, site, action, nature, and time.
 
The concept of “Non-Sculpture,” which Lee has proposed over many decades, is not a negation of sculpture. It is closer to a radical mode of thought that shifts sculpture away from the production of fixed objects and toward events, relationships, processes, and phenomena.
 
Lee occupies a distinctive position in the history of Korean modern and contemporary art. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Korean art scene was forming a discourse centered on the language of modernism imported from the West, the formal vocabulary of abstraction, and, later, the painting-centered discourse that would lead to Dansaekhwa. Flatness, materiality, spirituality, repetition, and performativity in painting became major terms through which Korean modern art was explained.
 
Lee, however, did not position himself within this current through painterly abstraction or modernist formal experimentation. While dismantling the traditional grammar of sculpture, he brought Korea’s everyday life, nature, folk sensibility, action, and site into the realm of art.

In this respect, Lee’s work should not be seen as a peripheral experiment within Korean art, but as an important practice that must be reread from the perspective of global modern and contemporary art history.
 
In Western art history, sculpture after the 1960s expanded from object-centered sculpture toward relationships among site, process, material, and action through Minimalism, Post-Minimalism, Conceptual Art, Land Art, performance, and Arte Povera. Lee’s work can be understood as an example of expanded sculpture that developed during the same historical period as these international shifts, yet independently, on the basis of Korean conditions and sensibilities.
 
 
 
Non-Sculpture: Transforming Matter into Event
 
Although Lee began with sculpture as his foundation, his art never remained confined within the genre. Moving across installation, photography, land art, performance, objects, and drawing, he explored the ways in which art emerges among things and nature, site and body, time and action. His work has long been recognized as a major current in Korean experimental art, and in recent years it has also been reread internationally as a key example of Korean avant-garde art.

Lee’s central concept of “Non-Sculpture” does not simply mean something that is not sculpture. For Lee, Non-Sculpture is a way of rethinking sculpture from outside the conventional boundaries of sculpture. Must sculpture necessarily exist as fixed material such as stone, wood, or metal? Can something without form, something invisible, something that disappears, or something that moves also become sculpture? Lee pursued these questions not through theoretical declaration, but through actual artistic practice.
 
The ‘Tying’ series, one of the central axes of this exhibition, condenses this line of inquiry. The act of tying stones, jars, everyday objects, and bodily forms with rope or cord is not a simple sculptural manipulation. The tied object retains its original materiality, yet produces a different sensory experience through traces of pressure and surface deformation. Hard stone comes to appear like soft flesh, and everyday objects are newly read within relations of compression and tension. At this point, sculpture becomes not the object itself, but a relationship that emerges among material and force, surface and pressure, form and trace.
 
Lee’s “immaterial” works make his practice even more significant within the discourse of global sculpture. He visualized natural phenomena without fixed form, such as wind, smoke, and fire. Cloth moved by the wind reveals the invisible flow of air, while fire burns matter and turns the process of disappearance and transformation into part of the work. What matters in these works is not the completed object, but the phenomenon that unfolds over time. Sculpture is no longer a static object, but an event in which nature, material, action, and time intersect.
 
At this point, Lee’s work can be compared with Western Land Art, Post-Minimalism, and Conceptual Art. Yet it is insufficient to explain his work simply by placing it in parallel with Western art history or by positioning it under Western influence. Lee transformed materials and sensibilities discovered in Korean everyday culture and the natural environment into an experimental language of contemporary art. Roof tiles, stones, ropes, kites, wind, and fire are not folk motifs or decorative signs of tradition in his work. They become devices that alter the very conditions of sculpture. Lee did not reproduce Korean elements; through them, he reconstructed the concept of sculpture.
 
Lee’s radicality therefore arises in two directions. First, rather than following the formal language of Western modernism, he liberated sculpture from the genre of material and form. Second, he transformed Korea’s everyday world, nature, and folk sensibility not into simple traditional imagery, but into a structural language of contemporary art. This is an important point that makes it impossible to explain Korean modern and contemporary art only through the painting-centered abstraction of Dansaekhwa.
 
 
 
Rereading Seung-taek Lee within Global Art History
 
The use of both the Olympic Sculpture Park and the indoor spaces of SOMA Museum of Art also corresponds closely to Lee’s artistic world. Earth Wearing Roof Tiles and Pillar Mask, installed in the park, are reread in connection with the drawings, sculptural objects, and archival materials shown indoors. The outdoor sculptures are not simply objects placed in a park; they become works experienced through site, earth, time, and the movement of viewers. The indoor exhibition reveals the process of formation, concepts, materials, and context behind these works, showing the structure of Lee’s practice, in which process is more important than result.

The exhibition’s placement of drawings and documentary materials with a weight equal to that of finished works is also noteworthy. In Lee’s practice, sketches, records, photographs, and traces of action do not remain auxiliary materials that simply explain completed works. They are essential layers that show how a work is conceived, where it takes place, and how it remains within time. For Lee, a work exists not only as a material result, but as a totality of thought, action, record, and memory surrounding it.
 
The recent international attention given to Lee can also be understood in this context. 《Lee Seung Taek: Non-Art, the Inversive Act》, held at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul in 2020, was a large-scale retrospective that newly illuminated more than six decades of his practice. Later, through his participation in《Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s–1970s》, co-organized by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Lee was reintroduced to the international art world as one of the representative figures of Korean experimental art of the 1960s and 1970s. The exhibition sought to shed new light on Korean experimental art not only as an innovation within Korean modern and contemporary art, but also as a current that expanded the scope of artistic practice in world art.
 
His works are held in major institutions in Korea and abroad, including Tate Modern, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, M+, Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, and the Seoul Museum of Art. This shows that Lee’s practice is being reevaluated beyond a specific case in Korean modern art history, as an important practice of expanded sculpture and experimental art within global art history.
 
Today, the global art world is again asking about the relationships between material and immaterial, ecology and site, body and action, record and archive. Ecological imagination after the climate crisis, the dissolution of genre after the post-medium condition, the relationship between performance and archive, and the rewriting of non-Western modern and contemporary art are all central issues in contemporary art. Lee’s work retains its contemporaneity precisely at this point. For decades, he has already placed natural phenomena, temporality, site-specificity, performativity, and immaterial experience at the center of his work, moving beyond object-centered sculpture.
 
 
 
The Value and Meaning of Seung-taek Lee’s Exhibition
 
In this sense,《Seung-taek Lee: At the Edge of Sculpture》is less an exhibition that looks back on the past than one that asks again where Korean experimental art stands from the perspective of global modern and contemporary art. Lee’s “Non-Sculpture” enables us to think about sculpture after sculpture. It shows how art can relate to the world after the dismantling of the object, how what disappears and what remains invisible can become the language of art, and how local sensibility can expand into a universal aesthetic question.
 
The greatest value of Lee’s work lies precisely here. At a time when Korean art was following Western modernism and a painting-centered discourse of abstraction, Lee practiced the radical possibility of sculpture from an entirely different direction. His work shows that Korean modern and contemporary art cannot be explained only through Dansaekhwa, Minjung art, or painting-centered narratives. At the same time, it suggests the possibility that Korean experimental art can be more actively repositioned within global art history.
 
《Seung-taek Lee: At the Edge of Sculpture》begins with the question of what sculpture is, but ultimately moves toward a larger question: how art senses and relates to the world. Lee’s “Non-Sculpture” is a practice that moves outside sculpture, yet paradoxically, it is also a practice that asks the most fundamental questions about the essence of sculpture. This exhibition shows that those questions remain valid today and deserve to be discussed more deeply from the perspective of global art.

Seung-taek Lee
 
Seung-taek Lee was born in 1932 in Goweon, Hamgyeongnam-do, and is one of the leading figures of Korean experimental and avant-garde art. After graduating from the Department of Sculpture at Hongik University, he developed an independent artistic world while moving across sculpture, installation, photography, land art, and performance. Since the 1960s, he has continued to question the form, material, and site of sculpture through the concept of “Non-Sculpture,” and is regarded as one of the most pioneering experimental artists in Korean modern and contemporary art.
 
 
SOMA Museum of Art
 
SOMA Museum of Art is a contemporary art museum located within Seoul Olympic Park. In connection with the Olympic Sculpture Park, it organizes exhibitions, research, and educational programs centered on contemporary sculpture, public art, and contemporary art. Through its spatial structure, which combines indoor exhibition halls with an outdoor sculpture park, the museum has continued to present the expanded possibilities of sculpture.

 

 
Exhibition Information
 
《Seung-taek Lee: At the Edge of Sculpture》
SOMA Museum of Art Building 1, Exhibition Halls 1–5, and Olympic Sculpture Park
April 10 – July 26, 2026
424 Olympic-ro, Songpa-gu, Seoul
Website: www.soma.kspo.or.kr