LEE BAE: THE IN-BETWEEN

Lee Bae’s exhibition at Perrotin Tokyo presents a new series of sculptures titled Brushstrokes, works made of bronze inspired by brushstrokes of India ink.

November 05, 2025 – December 27, 2025

In another room, a video is projected onto a screen. It was filmed in Korea and shows a performance in a field. It is the time when the rice paddy is prepared before transplanting the seedlings. We see a man—Lee Bae himself—in blue pants and a white shirt, kneeling in the mud. Then he begins to walk: he moves through the clay of the earth as it is stirred up by his steps and he sweeps the surface of the water. This is a farmer’s gesture, wide and precise at the same time. His eye is sharp, his wrist is firm; his hand wields the handle and fertilizes the landscape. The parallel with the artist’s gesture on a canvas is obvious.

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 monochromatic practice is a formal and immersive journey into the abysses of blackness. Subtly blurring the lines between drawing, painting, sculpture, and installation, he has developed his abstract aesthetics across categories to imbue the noncolor with tangible depth and intensity. Charcoal, obtained by burning wood and used to revive fire, offers a powerful metaphor for the cycle of life that has further inspired him to expand his exploration to include the fourth dimension of time.