Widely exhibited in South Korea and France—his birth country and adopted homeland respectively—but lesser known elsewhere, Lee Bae’s striking abstract art is made with a single material, charcoal. From this crude, organic substance which he makes himself in the mountainous forest region of Cheongdo, Lee inventively creates sublime sculptures, works on paper, paintings, and installations. For his first solo exhibition at New York’s Perrotin, he transformed the large gallery space into a monochromatic temple. Presenting three distinct ongoing bodies of work—Issu du Feu, Landscape and Untitled (ranging from 2002–2019)—he constructed an environment of sensory engagement where his idiosyncratic uses of charcoal were installed to be observed by an ambling audience. 

Lee’s charcoal-surfaced Landscape paintings, in which a large, thick block of powder-compressed charcoal is adhered to a white, painted canvas and then broken by the artist to show a jagged, naturalistic edge, look more like Richard Serra’s rough oil-stick drawings in texture and Ellsworth Kelly’s shapely structures in form than they do traditional landscapes—though they could be taken for aerial views. Kelly’s abstract canvases, often geometrically divided or shaped, were the subject of a survey at the Jeu de Paume shortly after Lee moved to Paris; while Lee would have been equally exposed to Serra’s powerful works on paper which employ a thick impasto of black paint-stick. Textured with a rough sandpaper to create a coarser surface, the blackness of the charcoal in Lee’s Landscape series is completely light-absorptive, while the contrasting white of canvas is sullied with the soot of earthy matter.

A pair of large-scale works on mulberry paper from his new Untitled (all 2019) series, which beautifully captures and preserves the artist’s performative gestures, was positioned at the end of the space, pinned to the wall. The first drawing, presenting a twisting shape similar to a giant snake or the letter “S,” consists of a wide charcoal mark which the artist made by pulling a large chunk of charcoal across the paper. The second drawing flaunts a series of wide, expressive brushstrokes that have been meditatively laid out.

Making art from things that are either devolving toward or evolving from nothingness, Lee creates art for a black and white world, where materials and their usage are all that matter in the end.