Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, June 19, 2023: Il Lee, a Korean artist (#1831)

Il Lee (1952) born in Seoul, Korea, is internationally celebrated for his pioneering work with ballpoint pen and a storied career spanning nearly five decades. Lee’s work, with its unorthodox media and distinctive style, and artistic contributions have received worldwide recognition. In his recent acrylic and oil works on canvas, Lee offers a counterpoint to his well-known ballpoint pen work and continues his early investigations of materials and process that began decades ago. Lee’s oeuvre offers a great breadth of approaches and media as he investigates drawing, the negative and its positive, line and form and of what is rendered and what is there but not rendered. Lee’s monolithic focus has created a universe at once cohesive and yet still expanding in all directions.

Born and raised in Seoul, Lee studied painting in the 1960s and 1970s with seminal figures of South Korean contemporary art including those in the vanguard of the abstract monochrome and minimalist painting movement. In 1977, armed with a distinct cultural background and artistic training, Lee moved to New York where he developed his signature process and style using ballpoint pen, a medium important to his practice over the decades.

Il Lee’s innovative and historically grounded ballpoint pen works were the subject of a critically acclaimed mid-career retrospective at the San Jose Museum of Art in 2007. His work has been exhibited at numerous museums and institutions, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Minneapolis Institute of Art, etc....

“A selection of drawings—striking indigo and black ink abstractions, all done exclusively in ballpoint pen, on paper and canvas—makes up this engrossing show by the veteran Korean artist Il Lee. The centerpiece is a 50-foot drawing that took two and a half months and 400 to 500 ballpoint pens to complete, with the artist working on sections at a time that were propped up against the wall in his Brooklyn studio. It is a sweeping, rhythmical abstraction in blue recalling the Italian Futurist paintings of Giacomo Balla, combined with elements of traditional Asian ink and wash painting.” –The New York Times

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