James Lee Byars and Seung-taek Lee’s Art Convenes in Venice

Can two artists born in the same year, worlds apart, and never having met make work that is eerily similar to each other? That’s the premise behind one of the more thoughtful and introspective collateral events at this year’s Venice Biennale. The two artists in question are James Lee Byars and Seung-taek Lee, both born in 1932, in Detroit and in Kowon (present-day North Korea), respectively. Their parallel interests extend from the material and the immaterial, the performative, the literary, the celestial and the lunar, the wind and breath. More than anything, they are both artists whose work has never fit into neat categories or movements but with practices that prized themselves on being open ended. 

At the Palazzo Loredan, the seat of the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, these two artists are presented in conversation. Curated by Allegra Pesenti, the exhibition acts as a follow-up to one staged last fall in London at Michael Werner Gallery, which represents the Byars estate and has provided the major support for the exhibition, along with Gallery Hyundai, Lee’s Seoul gallery. In some rooms, Pesenti has intentionally mixed works by the two artists that can make it difficult to immediately determine whose work is whose. 

“Sometimes the conversations are eerily similar,” Pesenti told ARTnews during a walkthrough of the exhibition, which runs through August 25. 

The setting of the Palazzo Loredan, once owned by the Loredan family, which produced three Doges and now a working scientific library, adds to the quiet serenity in this exhibition consisting of nearly 70 works. Because the palazzo’s status as an active place of scholarly research all of the works in the show must be hung in a such a way that the bookshelves are still accessible. Several appear to float, mirroring the two artist’s interest in the wind. 

Take for example Byars’s iconic World Flag (1991), consisting of strips of gold lamé, that hangs from the library’s mezzanine. As you walk by the lamé very subtly rustles as your body displaces air. The work finds its near twin in Lee’s Wind (Paper Tree), ca. 1980–89, consisting of strips of white Mulberry Hanji paper that are draped from five tree branches. It hangs on the other side of the room, gently catching the earlier breeze you created as you sauntered past World Flag.  

There’s also a sensuality present in many of the two artists’ works on view, whether it be The Golden Divan (1990) or The Monument to Cleopatra (1988), two all-gold works by Byars, or in sculptures like Lee’s Hip (1962) or Torso (ca. 1960–69), gold leaf sculptures of those parts of a woman’s body that are wrapped, constrained almost, by wire. In somewhat of a call-and-response—push-and-pull between the two artists if you will—Pesenti has place Byars is Elephant (1997), an installation of a large ball of Egyptian rope surrounded by lengths of gold fabric, nearby. 

Constraint is a key element in other works by Lee, like Tied Book (1976), a red-covered book bound by a white rope. Lee has carved into the book to give the appearance that the tension of the rope has warped its dimensions. This tied tome is actually a book by Lee, titled Woman Sculpture of the World, that accumulates some 600 photographs of sculptures from throughout art history, spanning the Venus of Willendorf to the work of Barbara Hepworth. 

Lee created the book because he found a dearth of texts on sculpture in Korean. As the title says, all of the sculptures in the book relate to depictions of the female form, which itself can be seen as a critique of the male gaze in art history. But now that the book has been bound, it can’t be cracked open again, it’s essentially now illegible. “It’s almost as if he’s saying his own book, what’s inside, is not worth looking at,” Michael Werner director Kevin Choe said. Another Lee work takes this illegibility further: Untitled (Non-Painting), from 1979, for which Lee has repurposed an ancient text into papier-mâché and placed it on the edges of an empty frame. 

Several works by Byars here also take cues from literary sources, like The Poetic Conceit (1983), consisting of a framed black-and-white reproduction of a painting of Goethe during his stop in Venice on his Grand Tour that is set against a black curtain. Further along is a Moonbook by Byars, two pieces of Bernese sandstone that have been carved into the shape of a crescent moon. “The books and the glass vitrines that contain them serve as repositories of world knowledge. Together, they are like a library of space and conscience,” Pesenti writes in a brochure accompanying the exhibition. 

The exhibition, titled “Invisible Questions that Fill the Air,” is especially resonant in Venice, where Byars lived intermittently between 1982 and 1997, the year of his death. (He often stayed not from the Palazzo Loredan.) Two of the works include objects sourced from Venice: The Reading Stand (1985), a 17th-century lectern, and The Chair of Transformation (1989), a 17th-century gondola chair. 

“Venice for Byars was very important because he saw it as a meeting of East and West. Thirty years ago that was a very different idea from what it is now, but he saw Venice as a place where everything came together in terms of aesthetics,” Michael Werner partner Gordon VeneKlasen said. 

That meeting of East and West was something that Byars placed at the center of his career, informed from the decade he spent in Japan in the 1950s and ’60s, and now in this current exhibition. Lee’s Untitled (1965/2020) likewise includes a found object, a yeontan, or coal briquette that is common in Korea, that rests atop an earthenware plinth. 

“Throughout my career, I have been pushed into a separate space because of other artists’ refusal to show their work alongside my own,” Lee told ARTnews in an email. “Often, I have seen my works relegated to side halls or corridors due to their being drastically different from the sculpture of my peers.” 

He added, “I am excited to be in dialogue with James Lee Byars. I have never met an artist like him in my life and yet we share this kind of kinship, visually and conceptually.”