The Form Before: Lee Bae

With a practice grounded in repetition, patience, and physical engagement, Lee Bae’s work holds evidence of time spent, decisions made, and the meditative process of building presence through the simplest of materials. Subtly blurring the lines between drawing, painting, sculpture, and installation, The Form Before is Lee Bae’s first exhibition in Australasia.

For more than thirty years, Lee Bae has explored the elemental, symbolic and material potential of charcoal. As an elemental substance forged in fire, charcoal is imbued with cultural memory, ritual and transformational properties. This exhibition brings these qualities forward, offering an immersive environment that foregrounds stillness, depth, and the elemental power of the colour black. Works are hung on the wall, arranged on the gallery floor and suspended in space in tension with one other. The viewer is invited to step through a kind of carbonised forest that captures the physicality of the artist’s brush work.

Lee Bae’s Brushstroke sculptures are understood not as marks on a surface but as movements in space. These movements carry rhythm, pressure, and direction before they become visible. As such, each form has a distinctly organic feel to them, twisting in continuous motion yet preserving the artist’s precise body movement. Through sculpture these fleeting gestures are given weight and duration, creating a contradiction between the lightness of gesture and the density of material. Bronze remembers Lee Bae’s intentions, holding the moment when form is still forming– when it has not yet decided what it will become.

Thus, The Form Before focuses on the moment a shape is just beginning to exist, before it becomes a finished object. Instead of describing completed forms, the exhibition looks at the conditions that make form possible – direction, movement, tension, and energy. This ‘before’ is not about the past, but about a state where form has not yet settled into a clear shape, even though its presence can already be felt.

The paintings installed alongside the sculptures extend this dialogue between surface and gesture. As viewers pass between painting and sculpture, they encounter the brushstroke in its many variations, sensing not only the material presence of charcoal but also the quiet force and energy held within each mark.

Titled Issu du Feu (born from fire), this series of works each hold a quiet luminosity. Composed of hundreds of small shards of charcoal meticulously arranged on canvas, Lee Bae polishes each piece to a dense, reflective finish. What emerges is a surface marked by natural striations and concentric rings; traces of time embedded in the wood itself. The textured planes catch and disperse light unpredictably, shifting with changes in atmosphere and movement in the gallery. Across these works, light becomes an active participant: absorbed, refracted, and released in shifting tones that invite viewers into a contemplative encounter.

Lee Bae uses charcoal ink to create his Brushstroke works on paper from 2025. Drawing from the legacy of traditional Eastern drawing and calligraphy, the works embrace the belief that spiritual cultivation emerges through disciplined control of gesture, breath and rhythmic movement during the act of creation. In the context of this exhibition, each brushstroke can be seen as a crystallisation of the artist’s thoughts and physical sensations, developed over an extended period rather than as spontaneous gestures. Hints of chance and uncertainty remain, visible in the twists and pauses of the lines, the tremors of the artist’s hand. Yet the brushstrokes possess a life of their own, vibrant and self-sustaining, expressive in a way that exists independently of their maker.

At once intimate and monumental, these works affirm Lee Bae’s position as a leading figure in contemporary abstraction. In this exhibition that spans two decades of his career, black is not an absence but instead a world of its own – dense, luminous and shifting. Light settles into pores, glides along edges, and reveals an unexpected spectrum within the monochrome. The works ask the viewer to linger, to lean into the subtleties of tone and texture, and to consider the quiet complexities of their surfaces.

Text by Madi Macdonald

About the artist

Born in Cheong-do, South Korea in 1956, Lee Bae studied at Hongik University. He has lived and worked between Paris and Seoul since 1990. His work has been exhibited widely across Europe, Asia and North America including at the Phi Foundation (Canada), Wilmotte Foundation (Italy), Musée des Beaux-Arts (France), Indang Museum (Korea), and Musée Guimet (France), and belongs to major public collections such as the National Museum of Contemporary Art (MMCA), Seoul Museum of Art (SEMA), and Leeum-Samsung Museum of Art. He is the recipient of numerous accolades, including the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France, 2018). In 2024, Lee Bae presented his exhibition La Maison de la Lune Brûlée as an official collateral event of the 60th Venice Biennale.