Hapchen, Korea-born artist Jaehyo Lee combines aspects of land art, installation art, arte povera, applied arts, furniture design, and minimalism to create imposing and intricate contemporary sculptures that highlight the forms and nature of the materials used to compose them: wood, metal, and stone.
Combining distinct traces of Land Art, Arte Povera and Minimalism Lee´s works cast a questioning eye over the roots of form, its function and its role within the natural world. Lee´s works willfully play with the oft-contested boundaries between modern art and design, referencing the idealist´s cubes, cylinders and cones as perversions of the chaise longue, the coffee table, the lampshade, and even the humble doughnut. Revealing a subtly humorous and unsentimental attitude to nature, what unites these works is a belief that the beauty of art is a product of the labor from whence it comes, whether this be the meticulous carving of larch trunks into the form of a perfect sphere or, equally, the precise bending and sanding of thousands of nails hammered one after another into a hunk of cut lumber.
Madison Gallery
More info: Website, Instagram (h/t: Madison Gallery).
