Lee Gil-Rae (Korean, born. 1961)

Lee Gil Rae was born in Yeongam-gun, South Korea. He graduated with bachelor and masters degrees in fine art and sculpture from Kyunghee University in Seoul, Korea.

Lee’s awareness of expressions of the nature of the earth, dirt and nature naturally results in his usage of natural materials. He employs everything from traditional materials such as wood, iron and stone to natural materials such as clam shells, oyster shells, marsh snail shells, and fragments of pottery. The artist constructs the overall form through the repetitive process of fixing these natural materials on sculptural materials like fiberglass reinforced plastics (FRP). 

His trees are made with eternal beauty of nature in mind. Pine trees are known for the evergreen tree regardless of the seasons. By using copper as a main material for his pine trees, the trees have become the physical properties of plant life into modern, mechanical forms. In other words, his sculpture represents the permanency in a beauty of nature.

The artist’s interest lies in the combination between the inner vitality of nature and the sensuous shapes of nature. The artist express the nature’s vital power and the formation through sensuous shapes. In his Pine Tree series, he uses a long oval shape copper rings, which then welded into a shape that resembles the bark of a tree.

His series of tree shapes is distinguished from traditional sculptures that are based on massiveness for its lack of voluminous sense. While maintaining a sense of traditional sculpture by applying labor intensified weaving technique, the artist is trying to find a possibility of post-sculpture that is differentiated from traditional sculpture. Moreover, one can see his recognition of border or post-border from the structure of the trees that the inside and outside are interconnected to each other. 

Courtesy via Kho, Chung-Hwan, <A Tree, Inherent Forms and Nature’s Original Form>, an excerpt from the criticism of Lee Gil-Rae’s the 6th solo exhibition