Review by Laure Martin(Lee Gil Rae: Sculptor of nature)

Lee Gil Rae was born in 1961 in Yeongam-gun, in the South-Korean province of South Jeolla. He graduated from Kyunghee University in Seoul with both a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in fine arts and sculpture. During his university training, he developed a three-dimensional artistic practice that includes nature, archaeology and history, drawing inspiration from Alberto Giacometti’s work. It is from this thought process that the sculpture series Lost Castle originated. Made from earth and iron, the hybrid works from the series display primitive influences and represent the artist’s first environmental questions. His unique work was soon acclaimed by critics and won numerous awards, including the Special Award from the Fifth Great Art Exhibition of the Youth and the Participation Award from the Eleventh Jung-Ang Great Art Exhibition in 1988. While his production centering around nature first took shape in the work From Soil to Earth - the result of a solo exhibition held at the Kumho Museum of Art in 1997 - Lee Gil Rae has actually been developing for more than twenty years an artistic practice focusing on the evolution of the environmental crisis. In his countryside-based studio located in the tranquil county of Goesan-gun, in the Chungcheongbuk Province, South Korea, he draws inspiration from the surrounding nature in order to create sculptural compositions borrowing from both trees and humans. Today, his works are presented in a myriad of solo and group exhibitions in Korea, Japan and the United States, and they are featured in prestigious permanent collections.

Lee Gil Rae nurtures a particularly close relationship with nature. As it is a true source of inspiration for the artist, he never stops appropriating nature as well as experimenting with it. Just as an archaeologist would have, he produced his first works by digging into the earth and integrating ancient-looking materials from his various “excavations”. These symbols of a past history - oyster shells, snail shells or pottery fragments - successively take place within his sculptures. It is undeniably when he uses copper as his main material that his work acquires a whole other dimension. According to Lee Gil Rae himself, “As I headed away from the city back towards the countryside home, I recall subconsciously following a cargo truck loaded with pipes and the beehive-like shape of the pipes were created by the cross sections: this left a deep impression on me”. Instead of seeing a mere pipe piece, the artist imagines it is the symbol of an organic, or even biological form. In keeping with his questioning of nature, he then decided to saw the pipes to cut them into rings that he would weld together to create “cellular structures”. Thus, as early as 1998, he explored the possibilities of copper compositions by delivering his first monumental installations, through the series Creation and Cohesion. From there he produced a series of heterogeneous works mixing traditional references from Korean culture (From Point to Line), representations of fruit and vegetables - Creation and Cohesion - Old Pumpkin and Creation and Cohesion Garlic - and vegetable - From Point to Line 1 - as well as human figuration - Cohesion-men.

The harmony of nature, being dangerously threatened by the development of industrialization which is causing an environmental crisis and deforestation, is at the center of the artist’s most emblematic series: Pine Tree. Through visual and metaphorical analogy, Lee Gil Rae extends his artistic reflection by using the pattern of a tree to symbolize the communication between man and nature. The pine tree represented in his new compositions echoes the country’s history as a true national emblem of South Korea, while also taking on a strong spiritual dimension: it is the symbol of longevity, honor and cohesion. Like a blacksmith, Lee Gil Rae uses a hammer to restructure the shape of the copper pieces in order to modify their shape. The now oval-shaped cells that make up the sculptures in the Pine Tree series henceforth resemble the bark of a tree. While Lee Gil Rae constantly compares his artistic process of adding copper rings to his sculptures to that of a painter who would add touches of paint to his canvas, it is also possible to compare his approach to that of an architect. Indeed, these compositions, getting more and more imposing, are the result of numerous preparatory drawings carried out with meticulous attention to detail. In his sketches, the lines get tangled and unraveled to imagine as precisely as possible the realization of a three-dimensional structure. By taking a close look at the materiality and properties of the object - without neglecting its metaphorical dimension - Lee Gil Rae’s vision can also appear to be that of a builder. While the unexpected often invites itself into the realization of his compositions -partly due to the complexity of the realization of his structures - the artist’s imaginary “trees” acquire an unprecedented force when they materialize in space. Thanks to a porous structure that allows light to pass through, Lee Gil Rae brilliantly plays with the possibilities of the medium and integrates the light component into his creative process in order to represent a flourishing nature. Thus, within the works presented in the exhibition, Lee Gil Rae builds a new alternative to reality. He composes a sophisticated nature that seems to be constantly striving to reclaim its rights by integrating itself into a new human-directed landscape.

Despite a resolutely geometric and minimalist approach, Lee Gil Rae leaves no stone unturned in order to get as close as possible to the representation of nature. He applies the fundamental principles of natural life to his own “trees” by delivering sculptures whose forms echo and “grow” over time. “It is no exaggeration for me to say that all the pieces of work that I now make come from a single pine tree. The image of the overall shape, part of the stalk, root, leaf, growth ring, gnarl, bark, etc. are used in part, then modified and shaped until complete,” he explains. Thus, if each plant seems to develop individually, Lee Gil Rae’s work is to be understood in terms of a whole, since it shows a “forest” of eternal trees with surrealist forms. The viewer, assisted by the titles of the works, New Pine Tree, Old Pine Tree and Millennium Old Pine Tree, can thus identify the representation of the different stages of the evolution of plant life and therefore grasp all the subtlety of the artist’s artistic approach.

In order to get as close as possible to the original life form, Lee Gil Rae also integrates copper wire in his compositions to represent the ring and leaves of a tree while embellishing his works with a rusty metal referring to the wood moss that usually invades tree trunks. These variations in texture, as shown in artwork Millennium Pine Tree-20 or Old Pine Tree 2019-12, among others, reinforce the impression of mimesis. But is it possible to realistically say there is resemblance when a form of plant life is represented through the use of a material emblematic of modernization? If the artist’s main intention seems to be to give back all its space to nature by keeping on planting immortal trees on the planet, an ambivalent character seems to emerge from his work. As a matter of fact, though his new surrealist compositions allow a natural form of life to survive in an industrialized world, the aesthetics of his organic compositions unveil ever-changing forms. While some of his works such as Millennium Pine Tree-8 or Millennium Pine Tree-7 still seem to be governed by negative human domination through presenting branches that are cut or sawn off, other works in the series such as Millennium Pine Tree-9 or Millennium Pine Tree-14 seem to break free of any hierarchy by taking over the space in an unexpected way. The “trees” are no longer represented vertically but rather, they hang on the walls. Faced with this new out-of likelihood composition, a feeling of “worrying strangeness” emerges. This concept is described by Sigmund Freud in his 1919 essay, and refers to the emotion felt in front of an object or an everyday thing that is familiar to us but whose meaning seems to be slipping from our grasp... Hence, when dealing with this nature that is no longer formal, several questions arise: What are we looking at? What is this new “vegetal” form that is hanging on the wall? And above all, how did we get here? Those questions, almost philosophical in nature, highlight the importance of Lee Gil Rae’s work. Dark and tortuous, fragiles and thin, his sculpted trees stand up majestically in the space and expose environmental issues, so cruelly topical. Lee Gil Rae questions us, makes us wonder, makes us think, and confronts industry and nature which he tames, poetically.