JaeHyo Lee
years with Cynthia-Reeves: 10
Curriculum Vitae (pdf)
HIGHLIGHTS
Seongnam Art Center, South Korea, 2016
Museum of Fine Arts Boston, 2015-16
LOTUS, public art installation Union Square New York, 2014
Montgomery Museum Contemporary Art, AL, 2012
Commission, Fortune 500 Company, Charlotte, NC, 2011
Museum of Art and Design, New York City, 2011
Winner, Triennial, Osaka, Japan
National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea
JaeHyo Lee has been rethinking and re-envisioning use of quotidian materials for several decades. Rather than dismantling each sculptural component and creating a hybrid aesthetic, Lee’s works emphasize his materials’ essential nature. The trajectory of his current work reveals his refined approach to nature – addressing simple elements and, from them, creating large scale works of remarkable impact. In his current solo exhibition, Walking With Nature, at the Seognam Art Center in South Korea, he has been able to exercise the full scope of his vision, with massive works of suspended stone, works of scale rendered in feather-light leaves, and the unique works in formed nails.
Often minimalistic, Lee’s typically monumental work centers around circular motifs, a re-envisioning of materials, and organic shapes, duly highlighted in the exhibited SLANTED BENCH. With varied logs crosscut and planned to expose oval patterns, which emerge as elongated mirror images reminiscent of dividing cells, viewers are asked to look into the work, beyond the physical surface, to discover that pattern can also serve as a structure. — (Emily Zilber, CRAFTED: Objects in Flux, catalog, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, August – January 2016 )
As noted by art critic Taeman Choi, “Nature seems chaotic and violent depending on how it is viewed, but Lee finds the source of autogeny in a sphere. A circle is a figure closely and symbolically related to co-existence, integrity and the found of all beings. When this circle is materialized into a body, it becomes a sphere. Therefore, the symbolic representation that a grain of all livings originating from this basic rounded body is the starting point of spheres which continue to appear in his works.”