March 24 – April 12, 201
511 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001

Kips Gallery is pleased to present “TREE OF LIFE”, a solo exhibition of Works by Seung Lee.

The exhibition will be on view at the Kips Gallery’s Location at 511 West 25th Street 2F, between 10th and 11th Avenues in Chelsea.

Seung Lee, who lives near Pratt Institute in New York, deals with a variety of themes in his artworks. He himself embodies multiculturality, which provides us with a certain perspective on his art world. As a New York artist, living and working in Brooklyn, he is called “Seung Lee.” He is highly reputed as an artist whose artworks well represent the artistic characteristics of the region. Koreans, however, call him “Lee Seung.” His identity is not fixed. The interchangeability of his identity has become the engine for the “circulation” between the real world and the art world. He has continuously tried to reconcile the two different worlds. Such unremitting attempts may be a survival strategy, but, at the same time, they have served to forge his artistic style. His artistic production includes paintings, drawings, media-art, and even installation art. Such diverse creative activities are like a continuous flow. “The uneven distribution which is not uneven” may be the way to describe the stage of his art as if Lao Tzu said, “The Tao that can be followed is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name” in the first chapter of Tao Te Ching.

Culture and the media are two inseparable themes in contemporary aesthetics. Seung Lee seems to cope with these topics ecologically. He cut out some of his old artworks and placed them in the glass bottles. His paintings also reveal the symbolism and allegory of life through carefully selected images from the nature. He even performed an act with canvases thrown away by students at Long Island University, where he currently teaches.

Lee Seung is also a contemplative educator, not only an artist. Korean tradition considers the king, the teacher, and the father as one. A teacher is ranked among the highest such as a father in a family and a king in a kingdom. Interpreted into today’s language, this somewhat feudalistic idea would indicate the congruent state among the law, ethics, and morality. As an art professor, he has a firm sense of morality. It is a recent trend that aesthetics is contemplated along with ethics. Therefore, various types of discussions about the so-called “aesthetic ethics” or “ethical aesthetics” are now in progress. Such an interdisciplinary way of thinking contributes to maintain the continuity of his work. It is in his artworks that concrete and individualistic meditation on art education is practiced. Here we can sense that the art-historical context continuously intervenes in this practice. Each work presented to us is a new being discovered by his concern about the discarded. At last, his work has preoccupied the contribution to the world-openness. Art Critic Byoung Soo Kim.

For more info: Seung Lee