“Untitled 95053” (1995), a depiction of ducks, displays all his experiments on image-related phenomena. On the background of white and sky-blue emerge vague shapes or vestiges of ducks, making the painting seem a depiction of the sky or a lake. According to Lee, all things are vague and images just need to be felt and shared the way they are formed in the viewer’s mind.
Lee Kang-so (b. 1943) received his bachelor’s degree from the Department of Painting at Seoul National University in 1965, and carried out various experiments on contemporary art in his hometown Daegu, South Korea. He founded the art group The New Methodology in 1968 along with Kim Chang-Jin, Chun Chang Woon, Yun Geon-cheol, and others, and between 1971 and 1973 participated in the Korean Avant-garde Association, AG In 1973, Lee held his first solo exhibition at Myeongdong Gallery, where he brought some old tables and chairs to make a pub out of the exhibition hall, transforming the gallery into a venue for ordinary people to communicate with one another. Thanks to his experimental artistic maneuvers, he made his name on the international stage, and since 2000s, he has been pushing the boundary of his art, using diverse media such as print, photography, and ceramic sculpture. From 1982 to 1993, he served on the faculty of Gyeongsang National University.
In his early years, Lee Kang-so was one of the artists who led to Korean contemporary art scene, but he decided to put all his energy into his solo work from 1977 on. His art had centered on installations up to then, but has been building and revolving around painting since. In his early days, he turned to expressive colors and brush strokes, but the painter came to heavily rely on achromatic colors since the mid-1980s, while his expressive brushing style has been maintained to this day. His paintings are often called “Duck Painting” for the bird frequently appears in his works between 1986 and 2002, a period formed into his unique painting style. The ducks in his early works look quite figurative, but they gradually take forms of abstraction, getting harder to recognize over time. The shapes, which are rendered into abstract ones through expressive techniques, sometimes look like ducks, but other times strike as minimalist patterns, drawn with one brushstroke. The fact that all his works are titled in the same manner as “Untitled-75031”makes it possible to guess that the painter’s subject matter is not always a duck. Many critics do not regard the forms as mere ducks but as a poetic imagery, rich in expressive implications. The painter himself once remarked that what he sought through painting was not to establish simple images but explore the phenomena related to image, and experiment with the possibility of new painting. Therefore, such criteria as figurative or abstract, expressive or minimalist, cannot describe this abstract painter’s works.
