The pairing of slicked-back white hair and a childlike grin has rarely suited anyone as well as it does Lee Kun-yong. The 83-year-old sat in his Seoul home on a wintry January afternoon, leafing through memories that stretched back more than half a century. Our meeting came just a week before the opening of his latest solo exhibition at Pace Gallery Seoul, “Body as Thought,” a show intended to gather key archival traces from his 50-year career at the frontier of Korea’s avant-garde experimental art. But Lee, like all good storytellers, was never content to stay on a single subject. The whole conversation unfolded as if a floodgate of stories had been thrown open. Names and scenes from decades past surfaced with startling clarity and before we realized it, two hours had slipped by. That habit of refusing the obvious has shaped Lee’s path from early on. In 1963, during the entrance exam for Hongik University’s art school, one of Korea’s most prestigious programs, applicants were instructed to sketch a plaster cast of Apollo. Everyone rushed to secure a seat with a clear frontal
The rebel returns: Lee Kun-yong and art of letting body speak
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