Lee Bae Presents 'Souffle d'Encre' at Perrotin

Lee Bae has unveiled his second solo exhibition in Mainland China. On view at Perrotin’s Shanghai outpost, the South Korean artist presents a suite of large-scale drawings from his Brushstrokes series, along with three towering sculptures that mimic the charcoal studies on the wall.

In Souffle d’Encre, the gallery has been dressed with dark walls and dim lights to accentuate the charcoal studies on view. Bae’s introduction into charcoal as a medium was a product of both necessity and chance. Having moved to Paris in 1990, the young artist struggled to afford paint and serendipitously stumbled upon a sack of barbecue charcoal which he used to create art. This sparked a lifelong fascination with charcoal that persists to this day.

Anyone who has used charcoal knows how unforgiving the medium is. Rather than try and control it, like other paints, Bae seeks to be on equal terms with the medium. “To listen to the voice of charcoal, Lee seeks to activate the memory deeply embedded in his body, by which he guides the movement of his hand,” wrote the show’s curator and art critic, Fei Dawei. “Each stroke is an unfolding of psychological time. As a result, his brushwork can be seen as the self-initiated performance of the medium itself, as well as the crystallization of the artist’s thoughts accumulated over a long period of time.”

The three white sculptures on view are a newer exploration into three-dimensional forms and perhaps signals what is to come for the artist. Souffle d’Encre will be on view at Perrotin Shanghai until December 17.

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Perrotin
3/F, 27 HUQIU ROAD,
HUANGPU DISTRICT,
SHANGHAI, 200002