Kang Seung Lee engages in various artistic media including drawing, embroidery, installation, and appropriation of organic materials and objects. His work involves extensive research periods that are not just documentary but also integrate imagistic elements. Lee’s work is an installation based on the many narrative and iconographic possibilities of artistic figures such as Goh Choo San, Tseng Kwong Chi, Martin Wong, José Leonilson, and Joon-soo Oh, among other artists who died due to AIDS-related complications. In the environment created by the artist, the spectator is able to reconfigure queer narratives in a transnational and transhistorical way. Drawings, embroideries made with 24-karat gold-plated lines, objects hung from the ceiling, and other elements installed on the walls allow viewers to move between narratives that pay homage to essential names of queer culture in an antimonumental way. How can micro- and macro-history be found in one installation? Lee prefers a pluralistic view of history rather than an encyclopaedic narrative.
This is the first time the work of Kang Seung Lee is presented at Biennale Arte.
—Raphael Fonseca
