Seoul: National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art

High above the central courtyard of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) in Seoul, hundreds of thin strips of cerulean fabric twisted and fluttered in the breeze between the museum’s two main buildings, where they were strung along a 70-meter-long rope traversing the open airspace. Wind (1970/2020), an understated and generative outdoor installation by Korean experimental artist Lee Seung Taek, asserts a conceptual logic at odds with conventional approaches to sculpture by deploying a minimal formal vocabulary unfolding dualities of materiality and ephemerality. This seminal work in Lee’s extensive oeuvre served as the initial point of encounter for visitors to “Lee Seung Taek’s Non-Art: The Inversive Act,” an encyclopedic presentation of approximately 250 sculptures, installations, paintings, and photos that sought to cement the artist’s historical legacy and trace links between manifold bodies of work he has produced over the past 60 years.