“Rooted to the Roots of Life - Net of Existence” Poster Image ©SAVINA Museum of Contemporary Art
SAVINA Museum of Contemporary Art holds Lee Gil Rae’s solo exhibition “Rooted to the Roots of Life: Net of Existence” from January 25 to April 21.
For the past 30 years, Lee has been expressing the vitality and generative principles of nature through sculptures depicting pine trees, which symbolize Korean identity, and natural objects, using copper pipes, which symbolize the machine age, as materials, and dissolving the boundaries between nature and artificiality to present an integrated worldview in which everyone exists and harmonizes together, beyond differences.
This exhibition presents a total of 60 artworks, including a new large-scale installation sculpture of pine roots and stones, as well as drawings. The artist utilizes a unique technique of assembling copper pipe sections to create an overall shape, realizing their organic properties as if each section exists as a living cell. The contrast and harmony between the seemingly unseen pine roots and the inanimate stones blurs the boundaries between living and non-living things, conveying the message that human and nature, visible and invisible, living and non-living, machine and nature complement and interact with each other as one organism, and that everything on earth is connected.
Lee Gil Rae (b.1961) graduated from Kyung Hee University College of Fine Arts, Department of Art Education, and majored in sculpture at the same graduate school. Lee has had several solo exhibitions at Opera Gallery in 2020, Gyeomjae Jeongseon Art Museum in 2015, Gallery BK in 2012, and SAVINA Museum of Contemporary Art in 2010, and also participated “Hangang Sculpture Project” (Hangang Park, Seoul, 2023), “One Inspiration” (Korean Cultural Center, Shanghai, Shanghai Art Collection Museum, Shanghai, China, 2023), “Serendipity, the Unexpected Discovery” (SAVINA Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul, GS Yeoulmaru, Yeosu, 2020). His artworks are currently in the collections of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, Seoul Museum of Art, Samsung Foundation of Culture, CJ Cultural Foundation, and Pohang Museum of Steel Art.
