Gallery KIWA is pleased to present a major exhibition of works from Lee Myoungho’s celebrated photographic style. On view from May 2o to July 19 at the gallery’s 45 Albemarle Street, Mayfair location in London, the exhibition hallmarks the multi-award-winning Korean artist’s return to the BRitish and European Art scene.
(no)thing brings together a selection of important artworks, including his acclaimed series Tree, among the most recognisable pieces that Myoungho has created to this day.
One of the great innovators of South Korean contemporary art, Myoungho looks to the highest observation of nature—to the art of outdoors, mixed media, the sublime reverence of the natural elements, and the conceptual investigation of image—to liberate his creativity.
Ahead of his time as both an artist and a philosopher, Lee’s works pose fundamental questions about the nature of reality and the environment, leaving an indelible mark.
With (no)thing, Myoungho uses his practice as a means to reinvent the everyday in an alternate view. Paramount is the decontextualization of natural elements made by installations using cloths of different colours and depicting natural environments and tree species in different seasons and hours of the day.
In addition to planning and construction of compositions, a full crew and industrial cranes are required to erect the backdrop, which isolates the natural element from its environment. This intervention reveals the ‘personality’ of each environmental subject.
With the process of photographing ‘portraits’ of nature as a performance art in itself, at (no)thing, he posits the essence of existence through the floating canvas, which the viewer is invited to imaginatively inhabit, to critique their consensus of reality.
The gallery’s upcoming exhibition in London will showcase the dictionary of biomorphic forms of his native Korea that Myoungho has been photographing since 2006.
Charting the artist’s procedures, the show will reflect his effort to disrupt and refashion our modes of perception and respect for nature.
Coinciding with this year’s celebration of the 55th Earth Day anniversary at Gallery KIWA, the group of works on display at (no)thing includes the longest-lasting series of Myoungho’s career so far, comprising works from the famous Tree and the Nothing But series spanning from 2006 to 2024. Gallery KIWA is the first Korean gallery to exhibit mixed media artworks by Lee Myoungho in London in its inaugural exhibition of the artist’s work.
The style overarching the body of works at (no)thing emerged from the early 2000s, Lee’s explorative period. Through this interplay between nature and artifice, he collapses the traditions of portraiture and landscape painting and photography, examining the nature of representation and its effect on nature itself. Myoungho has arrived at a visual language resembling a poetic reflection on the social and environmental states of the world. Over the course of nearly ten years, he has produced some of his best-known mixed media works in this style, comprising the cycles known as Tree, its unprecedented evolution into Colour Wine uniquely displayed at KIWA, and Nothing But, all taking part in the exhibition.
‘If Myoungho teaches anything, it is that there are no conclusions and no true beginnings,’ observes C. J. Chun, the director of KIWA, as he collaborates with the artist in building the figurative signature of (no)thing. ‘There is only the middle, the present time of life.’
Based in Seoul, Lee has exhibited internationally, with a previous appearance in London before Gallery KIWA in 2020. His work resides in a number of institutions, including the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.
(no)thing is energised in direct collaboration with the artist himself. The exhibition’s mission is to represent and promote the conceptual movement behind Lee Myoungho’s work in relation to such a critical period for the global environment.
