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Exhibitions  >  Building Blocks

Building Blocks

(now)
AUG 11 onwards
VENICE, CA
By appointment only
About the Exhibition

Drawing upon his training in architecture and art, Hun Chung Lee traverses in the intervening spaces where each field moves seamlessly together. His approach to design and color is to let the materials speak for themselves and celebrate the serendipitous outcome of intense heat engaging with consistent materials. With a whimsy for texture and corporeality that extends to smaller objects created for daily use, form naturally lives with function whether it be architecture as sculpture or art as furniture. Lee’s works become part of a fluid engagement with life and one through which viewers are living and moving. While playfully overlapping and embracing boundaries, Lee always returns to the building blocks – the fundamentals of materiality and the creative process – where he continually restarts his exploration.

The exhibition is realized in three distinct spaces that feed and extend from one another. In the Oxford Triangle House, each floor conceptually evolves, where the simplicity of volumes, forms, and design speak to the evolution of a definitive expression of molded earth. In the basement, the works stand in homage to its archaic nature with reverence and awe. On the ground floor, the works engage with unexpected juxtapositions – texture animates material, concrete entertains as painting, and a free-standing wall easily pivots from architecture to sculpture. The top floor opens out to the outdoors allowing a dialogue between the works and nature that is illuminated by the ever-changing path of the sun. Across from the Oxford Triangle House in the gated park, Lee’s works fully engage with the outdoors, while suggesting a basic unit of human infrastructure. The exhibition comes full circle in the Hampton Compound where Lee shares his process and vision. Here, visitors are encouraged to lounge and enjoy tea, activating Lee’s sculptural stools, as well as his BADA series, wares for daily life.

Hun Chung Lee is a multidisciplinary artist living and working between Yangpyeong and Los Angeles. Often utilizing ceramics and concrete, Lee creates functional objects, sculptural furniture and large scale installations that become traces of labor and heat. His practice challenges conventional perceptions in art and design, while embracing their fundamental elements: materiality and form. Lee’s works are part of the LACMA, Archie Bray Foundation Center, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Bonte Museum, Arario Museum, Seoul Museum of Craft Art, Four Seasons Hotel, Hongik University Contemporary Museum, Genexine Bio Innovation Park collections among many others. He holds a BFA and a MFA in Ceramics from the Hongik University, MFA in Sculpture from San Francisco Art Institute and a PhD in Architecture from Kyung-won University.

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