LEE Jeongbae: Form of Living: Solo Exhibition

LEE Jeongbae (b. 1974) has approached landscape painting through a perspective that captures fragments of nature discovered within the urban environment. He renders moments such as sunlight accidentally revealed between buildings or the silhouettes of sky and mountains using artificial materials like resin and aluminum, transforming natural scenery into geometrically segmented planes. The process of rubbing and coating the surface hundreds of times reflects what he calls the attitude of “rubbing flat”—an attempt not to add new meanings but to erase unnecessary layers, leaving only the surface. His monochromatically finished landscapes retain sensations and memories rather than concrete depictions of nature. These abstract landscapes function as sensory topographies that prompt us to reconsider the nature we pass by in the city, while posing questions about the very act of seeing a landscape. This exhibition highlights the point at which LEE’s artistic world expands into furniture, presenting how his formal exploration extends into living space under the concept of “furniture made by an artist.” Based on structure, proportion, and balance, he creates furniture with fundamental usability and installs it in the gallery as an environment resembling an actual living setting.

 

For LEE, furniture is not a shift in genre but the result of a sculptural sensibility accumulated over many years expanding into the realm of life. Beginning his newly married life without proper furniture and making a small table himself became a turning point, prompting him to reflect simultaneously on the relationships between wood as a material, space, the body, function, and form. Over the following sixteen years of woodworking, he came to perceive furniture as something akin to tailored clothing fitted onto space, discovering how closely everyday life and form-making are intertwined. This process of making is also an accumulation of time that has passed through the artist’s hands and body. He regards furniture not as mere objects but as sculpture. Planes, structures, and proportions are composed with the same rigor as sculptural works, yet the pieces are truly completed only when they are actually used. What he calls “beauty in use” refers not to a form that remains an object of contemplation, but to an aesthetic condition that emerges through bodily contact and the accumulation of time. Utility and beauty are not separate; his work seeks the point where function and form coexist as a single state. The exhibition reveals the structure of living through a space where various pieces of furniture and lighting are arranged like a single scene. Rather than simply viewing the works, visitors find themselves briefly inhabiting them. The rhythm of horizontals and verticals, the seating formed from a lowered gaze, and the subtle shifts of color created by light and wood delicately awaken the body’s sensory awareness of space. Furniture forms a unified environment, and the exhibition gently loosens the boundaries between art and design, exhibition and everyday life.

 

LEE Jeongbae received his BFA in Oriental Painting from Hongik University, where he also earned his MFA from the same university. He has held solo exhibitions at ARARIO MUSEUM in SPACE (Seoul, 2023), Seoul City Hall (Seoul, 2021), and Gallery Hyundai (Seoul, 2010), among others, and has participated in institutional exhibitions at National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Deoksugung (Seoul, 2024), Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art (Ansan, 2024), and SOMA Museum of Art (Seoul, 2021). His works are included in the collections of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul Museum of Art, Whanki Museum, and the ARARIO Collection.