Kang Seung Lee (b. 1978), a multidisciplinary artist, challenges the mainstream history predominantly centered on the First World, white, male, and heterosexual narratives, while unveiling the stories of marginalized minorities excluded from this history. Like a historian, the artist investigates, excavates, and studies public and private archives.
 
Lee reappropriates archives of queers marginalized by the mainstream, transforming them into mediums completed through his body, such as drawings, embroidery, tapestries, ceramics, textile sculptures, and neon works. By doing so, he proposes alternative ways to rewrite and reimagine history.

A notable feature of Kang Seung Lee's early works is his practice of inviting collaborators from diverse backgrounds, including differences in race, sexual orientation, and origins, to participate in the creation of his art. His collaboration-based projects unfold as open-ended, ongoing artistic endeavors, providing his collaborators with opportunities to contribute to the creation of new narratives while engaging in further learning experiences.
 
This collaborative structure began with his early project Untitled (Artspeak?) (2014–). Kang Seung Lee invited 20 fellow artists he knew in the U.S. at the time to collaborate. He provided each collaborator with a hand-drawn, enlarged copy of the page from Robert Atkins' book Artspeak: A Guide to Contemporary Ideas, Movements, and Buzzwords, 1945 to the Present corresponding to their birth year and asked them to edit it.

These collaborators, who represented a variety of ages, genders, races, sexual orientations, and cultural backgrounds, filled the margins of the pages with annotations, anecdotes, events, and drawings related to works, musicians, and filmmakers omitted from the original text.

The resulting edited pages collectively recorded a multi-layered historical narrative intersecting diverse individual experiences, deconstructing the male-centric, heteronormative, and colonialist perspectives embedded in the original history of the book.

Meanwhile, in his 2016 solo exhibition “Absence without leave” at Commonwealth and Council in Los Angeles, Lee presented a series of graphite drawings that memorialize and document the lives of queer individuals who lived brief lives. 
 
Lee’s drawings are based on photographs depicting gay men in the 1970s and 1980s America, including Robert Mapplethorpe’s self-portraits and Peter Hujar’s portrait of David Wojnarowicz. While faithfully replicating the source photographs, Lee erased or rendered the human figures indistinct. 
 
This absence of figures suggests the anxiety and despair brought about by the AIDS epidemic, which spread across the United States and the world, as well as the societal and governmental denial of the disease’s existence at the time.

The following year, Kang Seung Lee held his first solo exhibition in Korea. The 2018 exhibition “Garden” at ONE AND J. Gallery was composed of drawings, installations, and video works that commemorated and documented the lives of Derek Jarman and Joon-soo Oh. Both were gay rights activists in the 1990s who passed away from AIDS-related complications—Jarman in the UK and Oh in Korea. 
 
Starting two years prior to the exhibition, Lee made multiple visits to Derek Jarman’s personal garden, collecting plants that Jarman had personally selected and arranged, while recreating traces left behind in the garden. As a way to remember and record Jarman, Lee embroidered the plants, garden sculptures, and excerpts from Jarman’s diary—along with his handwriting—onto traditional Korean hemp fabric using gold thread. 
 
This performative act of documentation through the artist’s body transforms Derek Jarman’s life, marked by his fight against the social stigma of AIDS and homophobia, into an intensely powerful and noble memory.

Alongside this, Kang Seung Lee brought the life of Joon-soo Oh—a Korean gay rights and AIDS activist who passed away at a young age—into historical focus as a narrative that must be recorded and shared. The artist recreated materials related to Oh, including records of his activism with the gay rights organization “Chingusai” ("Between Friends"), letters exchanged with friends, and his diaries and poems published posthumously by his friends, through drawings and embroidery works. 
 
The 160 x 120 cm drawing Untitled (Joon-soo Oh's Letter) (2018) features an enlarged reproduction of a letter in which Joon-soo Oh expressed the loneliness he felt imagining his own death from AIDS. Lee meticulously recreated Oh’s handwriting and even the creases of the paper. Unlike his earlier smaller-scale drawings, this piece is monumental in size, displayed vertically like a memorial. By inviting viewers to slowly read and contemplate the work, Lee re-inscribed Joon-soo Oh’s life into the collective memory of contemporary audiences.

In this way, Kang Seung Lee laboriously recreated the lives of two individuals who lived in different parts of the world, memorializing and recording their lives of constant resistance as history through meticulous, labor-intensive media. The exhibition wove together collected materials and objects gathered by following the trajectories of their lives in two disparate locations. By intersecting and connecting their parallel struggles, acts of creation, and resistance, the exhibition became a space of remembrance and homage.

In 2019, Kang Seung Lee curated an exhibition with young Korean queer artists in their twenties and thirties, reimagining a timeline of Korean queers erased from history. Titled "QueerArch," the exhibition was held at Hapjungjigu and began with the personal archive of Hahn Chae Yoon, an activist at “QueerArch” (Korean Queer Archive, established in 2002) and the editor-in-chief of the Korean queer magazine “Buddy” (1998–2003), along with donated materials from the magazine. 
 
Based on months of research conducted at QueerArch, Lee and the participating artists developed a creative and alternative timeline expressed through graphic design, sculpture, installation, video, and fashion. In this project, Lee took on multiple roles as an artist, curator, and exhibition director.

This temporary queer community, shaped through Kang Seung Lee's curatorial practice, included fashion designer Kim Se Hyung (a.k.a. AJO), archivist and researcher Ruin, artist and stage director Moon Sang Hoon, drag king Azangman, visual designer Kyungmin Lee, and sculptor Haneyl Choi. 
 
Through this collaborative exhibition, Lee sought not only to rewrite a history dedicated to the activist legacy of queer communities but also to illuminate the contours of a collective that has continuously sought connection and solidarity to resist isolation in times of crisis.

In 2020, with the global disaster caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, discrimination and hatred, which were already pervasive in everyday life, spread simultaneously. Vulnerable places and groups, which were the most susceptible to the spread, became the primary targets, and groups such as migrants and LGBTQ+ individuals, who were the most vulnerable and in need of community, became the subjects of public condemnation and hatred. At the same time, in the West, hatred and discrimination against Asian people intensified in various places, and in Korea, the news of consecutive transgender suicides was reported.
 
In the 2021 solo exhibition "Briefly Gorgeous" at Gallery Hyundai, Lee presented an archive as a form of practice that connected the past history of the queer community with queer individuals in the midst of contemporary crises.
 
In the exhibition, the artist invoked Asian artists, such as Hong Kong-born photographer Tseng Kwong Chi and Singaporean dancer Goh Choo San, who gained fame with the Washington Ballet in the 1980s, among artists who died or survived from AIDS, a pandemic that has crossed the history of LGBTQ+ individuals even before the COVID-19 pandemic.

The video work Untitled (Shawn McQuate) (2021) documents the process of recreating a 1980 poster work by Tseng Kwong Chi, in collaboration with ballet dancer Shawn McQuate, who was the model for the original poster. Despite losing his sight due to HIV-related complications, McQuate painstakingly posed in the recreated costume after 41 years to reproduce the original poster.
 
Additionally, the artist created drawings of Kim Ki-hong, a transgender activist and music teacher in Korea who passed away in early 2021, and Byun Hee-soo, a soldier who was forcibly discharged from the army due to undergoing gender confirmation surgery. The artist also sensually arranged various images, texts, and objects as fragments of different times, spaces, and contexts.

In the basement exhibition space, the logo of the “King Club,” a gay club in Itaewon that became a target during the spread of COVID-19, was assembled into a puzzle and hung on the wall. The club's lighting was set up, and then the individual playlists created by fellow artists, who interpreted the meaning of queer spaces, were played.
 
In this way, the exhibition space flexibly transformed into a queer museum, archive, and club—spaces that hold the memories, experiences, and narratives of the queer community.

His new work The Heart of A Hand (2023), presented at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea's “Korea Artist Prize 2023” exhibition, reexamines the life of Goh Choo San, a Singaporean choreographer and dancer who passed away at a young age due to AIDS-related complications.
 
Goh Choo San was a choreographer and artistic director for the Washington Ballet and collaborated actively with major American ballet companies such as the American Ballet Theatre and Houston Ballet. However, his history and achievements have largely been erased from both mainstream American art history and queer history.
 
Kang Seung Lee sought to remember and rewrite his life and legacy by collaborating with queer community members, including Filipino transgender and non-binary choreographer Joshua Serafin, filmmaker Nathan Mercury Kim, and Seoul-based transgender composer KIRARA. This collaboration resulted in the video work The Heart of A Hand.
 
The video is based on Goh Choo San's choreography Configurations (1981). In this, choreographer Joshua Serafin reinterprets the original choreography by mixing classical ballet, contemporary dance, and nightclub-style movements. Serafin's choreography is accompanied by intense EDM tracks, creating a feeling that distances it from the original work.

Serafin's fluid movements and pulsating sound not only express the achievements left by Goh Choo San but also deconstruct his choreography, presenting a new imagination for the future of queerness that transcends regions, nationalities, and generations.
 
In this way, Kang Seung Lee questions a reality where those who existed but remained hidden are erased and continues a "care" practice by resurrecting the erased narratives of individuals. By doing so, he connects these people across time, borders, races, and genders. To this end, the artist has gathered fellow queer artists and activists to collectively engage in the rewriting of history, leaving behind stories that will be passed down to future generations.

”I would like my work to question the erasure of others who came before and remain unseen, to generate conversations about the space that holds intergenerational connections and care, and to be an invitation to reimagine invisibility as potentiality.” (Kang Seung Lee, “Kang Seung Lee on Tseng Kwong Chi”, in Denise Tsui, ed., Collected Writings by Artists on Artists vol. 2 (CoBo Social, 2021), pp. 96–103.))

Kang Seung Lee received his M.F.A from the California Institute of the Arts, USA. Lee has had solo exhibitions at Vincent Price Art Museum (Los Angeles, 2023), Gallery Hyundai (Seoul, 2021), ONE AND J. Gallery (Seoul, 2018), Artpace (San Antonio, 2017), Commonwealth and Council (Los Angeles, 2017, 2016), Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (Los Angeles, 2016), Pitzer College Art Galleries (Claremont, 2015), Centro Cultural Border (Mexico City, 2012), and among others. 
 
Lee has exhibited internationally including at Hammer Museum (Los Angeles, 2023), Palais de Tokyo (Paris, 2023), de Appel (Amsterdam, 2023), Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, 2022), National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea (Seoul, 2020), and PARTICIPANT INC (New York, 2019). He has also participated in New Museum Triennial (New York, 2021), and 13th Gwangju Biennial (Gwangju, 2021).
 
Lee is the recipient of the CCF Fellowship for Visual Artists (2019), the Rema Hort Mann Foundation grant (2018), and Artpace San Antonio International Artist-in-Residence program (2017). Lee’s work is in the collections of Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea; The Getty, Los Angeles; among others.

References

• 이강승, Kang Seung Lee (Artist Website)
• 올해의 작가상 2023, 이강승 : “움직임을 불어넣다” - 케이비어 문 (Korea Artist Prize 2023, Kang Seung Lee: “Setting Things in Motion” - Kavior Moon)
• 갤러리현대, 이강승 (Gallery Hyundai, Kang Seung Lee)
• 원앤제이 갤러리, Garden (ONE AND J. Gallery, Garden)
• 합정지구, 퀴어락 (Hapjungjigu, QueerArch)
• 갤러리현대, 잠시 찬란한 (Gallery Hyundai, Briefly Gorgeous)
• 월간미술, Sight & Issue : 이강승 “잠시 찬란한”
• 국립현대미술관, “손의 심장” – 이강승 (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea (MMCA), “The Heart of A Hand” – Kang Seung Lee)