LEE BAE – EN ATTENDANT: WAITING

Lee Bae – En attendant: Waiting

Museum SAN, Wonju, South Korea

Apr 7 – Dec 13, 2026

Known for his charcoal-based practice, Lee Bae presents his solo exhibition En attendant: Waiting at Museum SAN in Wonju. The exhibition surveys more than three decades of the artist’s work across painting, sculpture, installation, and video, centered on charcoal as his defining medium.

Born in Korea and based between Paris and Seoul, Lee Bae began working with charcoal in 1990 while living in Paris, initially as a practical alternative when traditional painting materials were not affordable. Over time, charcoal became central to his artistic language, connecting his practice to the traditions of Korean ink painting while expanding into a contemporary, material-driven exploration of form and process.

Throughout his work, charcoal functions not only as a medium but as a conceptual framework. It embodies cycles of creation, extinction, and transformation—processes inherent to its making, where wood is burned, reduced, and reconstituted into a new material. These cycles extend into broader considerations of nature, time, and existence, which remain consistent themes across Lee’s practice.

At Museum SAN, the exhibition unfolds as a continuous spatial journey that integrates architecture, landscape, and artwork. The presentation spans both indoor galleries and outdoor sculpture fields, reflecting the institution’s founding concept of “Space, Art, Nature.” Visitors move from the museum’s entrance—marked by the monumental charcoal work Issu du feu (From Fire)—through a sequence of interior spaces, including the lobby installation of sixteen Brushstroke paintings and the contrasting “White” and “Black” gallery environments, before arriving at Becoming, a large-scale installation combining projected brushwork and soil from the artist’s hometown of Cheongdo.

The exhibition extends outdoors into the museum’s landscape, where large-scale Brushstroke sculptures are installed in dialogue with the surrounding architecture and natural environment. Across all sections, the works are experienced in relation to changing light, seasons, and atmospheric conditions, emphasizing temporality as a central aspect of the exhibition.

The title En attendant (“Waiting”) reflects an active condition rather than a passive state. For Lee Bae, waiting is understood as a period of incompletion and transformation—an essential phase within both artistic process and natural cycles. This concept resonates throughout the exhibition, where material, space, and time converge to create an evolving and immersive environment.

April 6, 2026