Seung-taek Lee

Since the 1950s, Seung-taek Lee has created a wide-ranging body of work, traversing sculpture, painting, photocollage, installation, Land art, and performance, and upending conventional understandings of what art can be and what constitutes it. Against the backdrop of postwar South Korea’s rapid modernization and profound social transformation, in tandem with the emergence of Korean experimental art, Lee’s singular practice epitomized an approach he termed “non-art,” by which meanings and properties traditionally attributed to materials, forces, and environments are unfixed and transformed. This presentation of works from Dia’s collection, alongside a key loan, brings into focus how Lee locates the artistic potential in otherwise overlooked materials, ephemeral phenomena, and cultural memory while incorporating vernacular and shamanistic motifs. Spanning painterly surfaces, assemblages, and spatial installations from the 1960s to the early 2010s, this exhibition showcases Lee’s sustained effort to imbue the mundane with vitality through an expansive methodology, shifting between the material and immaterial, permanence and transience.

Seung-taek Lee is curated by Min Sun Jeon, assistant curator.

Seung-taek Lee was born in Gowon, Hamgyeongnam-do, Korea, in 1932, during the Japanese occupation of the country. At age 19, Lee relocated from North to South Korea and served in the military during the Korean War. After the war, he enrolled in the department of sculpture at Hongik University, Seoul, where he also studied art history and philosophy. A key figure of the Korean postwar avant-garde, Lee has challenged conventional categories of art by giving expressive form to everyday materials and invisible forces while responding to the shifting social, historical, cultural, and environmental conditions of his time. Lee’s work has been the subject of survey exhibitions at Sungkok Art Museum, Seoul (2012); Frieze Sculpture, London (2014); Palazzo Caboto, Venice (2017); National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul (2020–21); and Seoul Olympic Museum of Art (2026), among others. His work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s–1970s, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2023–24); and Minimal, Bourse de Commerce–Pinault Collection, Paris (2025–26); as well as the Biennale de Paris (1969); Bienal de São Paulo (1971); Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2004, 2010); Seoul Mediacity Biennale (2025); and Singapore Biennale (2025). Lee lives in Seoul.