Korean artist Lee Bae, based in Paris and Cheongdo, has gained international recognition for is extraordinary aesthetic and material experiments with charcoal – comprising various media as well as physically immersive installations.

Charcoal has figured prominently in Lee Bae’s practice since 1990, when the artist first moved to Paris and took up the ubiquitous material out of economic necessity. In this time of transition, charcoal also provided a cultural link to home, recalling the soot-based India ink used in Korean calligraphy but also the material’s many domestic applications: In Korea, it has been used in homes as a natural purifying agent for thousands of years. Lee Bae continues to engage charcoal with formal and conceptual rigour, creating stunning works of art that draw out nuanced meaning from the ancient matter.

However, Lee Bae’s works are not industrially produced, but created through profoundly personal and organic means of production. Sourced from his hometown of Cheongdo, South Korea where the artist also maintains a studio, Lee Bae carefully selects the pine trees that he then burns for two weeks in a custom-made kiln, transforming the verdant wood into black sculptures.

Viewers are invited to wander through a charged space, approaching the sculptural installation as a site of contemplation.

The title, “The In-Between”, builds on Lee Bae’s approach in his previous exhibitions (including Between in New York). This “in-between” holds the convergence of East and West, abstraction and matter, gesture and memory. The artist, who divides his time between Seoul and Paris, works within this kind of transition: between two cultures, two times, from childhood to adulthood, from the Korean countryside to his Paris studio.

But in Tokyo, these black shapes confronting us in the white space may also carry another message. They speak of origins and becoming, of blossoming and rebirth. They establish a space of listening, of dialogue, of walking and meditation, of breathing. They recall that art can be a threshold, a place where we move from one world to another.

In an international context saturated with violent images and radical oppositions, in a time of massacres and wars all around us, The In-Between affirms the power of the “middle”: a fertile space where the world can be reborn, where man and nature can once again find each other and be attuned, where transformation occurs.

Lee Bae’s artistic practice involves a deep commitment to the cyclical transformation of charcoal, ushering the raw matter on its journey from wood to fire to carbon to powder. Tracing this transformation the artist allows viewers to experience the surprising aesthetic multiplicity of this extraordinary material.

LEE BAE
“THE IN-BETWEEN”
PERROTIN GALLERY
Through 14 March 2026
TOKYO, JAPAN
https://www.perrotin.com

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