Lee Bae’s work is often approached through its material gravity — the weight of black, the persistence of the brushstroke, the sense of repetition carried forward by hand. In this exhibition, however, what registers first is not expression but restraint. The brushstroke appears less as a mark made once than as a unit returned to repeatedly, held in place by scale, density, and placement. What emerges is a condition where gesture no longer escalates or resolves, but settles into structure — sustained, compressed, and quietly maintained.
Across the works on paper, the brushstroke does not behave as an image to be read frontally. Its edges thicken and thin, surfaces drag and lift, density accumulates unevenly. These variations do not suggest movement so much as pressure held in suspension. In Brushstroke-T1 (2025), layers overlap until the stroke loses its directional force. What remains is not a trace of action, but a record of return — the same gesture re-entered, adjusted, and stabilized.
This logic carries into the sculptures. In Brushstroke S6 (2025), the brushstroke leaves the wall entirely, rising into space as a stacked, bending form. The sculpture does not stand upright in assertion; it leans, curves, and supports itself through balance rather than monumentality. Weight is distributed carefully. Each segment depends on the next, producing a structure that feels held together rather than constructed.
Throughout the exhibition, black does not function as symbol or depth. It accumulates. Layer by layer, surface becomes structure, and structure becomes a way of holding time. Repetition is not used to intensify emotion or produce rhythm, but to reduce variance — to keep conditions consistent enough for the work to remain legible without resolution.
What ultimately emerges is a displacement of authorship. The hand is present, but it does not dominate. The work does not announce gesture; it contains it. Forms do not progress or narrate. They remain. The exhibition asks less to be interpreted than to be maintained — by wall, floor, gravity, and repeat.
