LEE KUN-YONG

In 1970s Korea, artistic meaning and intent were often easily reduced to political interpretation amid conditions of strict control and censorship. Within this context, Lee deliberately avoided approaches grounded in emotion, expression, or overt messaging. Instead, he established logical structures based on conditions and rules, which he then carried out through the body. “Subverting mechanisms of control was the only way for me to express, represent, and inscribe myself within those altered spaces of lives, where systems and authority had appropriated and invalidated public discursive capabilities,” he has said.

From the mid-1970s onward, he began to engage the body as a medium, referring to each action not as a “performance” but as an “Event,” and later as a “Logical Event.” Everyday actions such as walking, eating, and moving one’s hands were not spontaneous gestures, but executions designed to test how relationships between body, space, and time operate. These actions unfolded as formal experiments that made those relationships visible, and Lee continued to extend this line of inquiry across a wide range of media.

Pace’s exhibition in Seoul focuses on photographs, artist notes, and video works. For Lee, documentation of his performances is a vital phase of the work in which the established logic can be reread and reconfigured. Rather than remaining fixed events of the past, his performances pose new questions for the contemporary moment, inviting varied interpretations and readings through their structures and records.

The gallery’s show features videos of the premieres of Same Area (1975) and Indoor Measurement (1975), Lee’s first two major performance works, both of which debuted at Baekrok Gallery in Seoul on April 19, 1975. These seminal through repetitive actions such as folding and unfolding paper or cutting and connecting tape, logically articulating the relationships between space, the body, and objects. The exhibition also includes photographs documenting performances such as The Biscuit Eating (1977), Fence in the Gallery (1977), and Logic of the Hand 3 (1975), images that are being presented publicly for the first time at Pace. Together, these works shed new light on the logical experiments Lee initiated in the 1970s and continues exploring in his practice today. During the run of the exhibition, Lee will also present two live performances at the gallery—further details about these events will be announced in due course.