The Shape of Absence : Kyungtaek Lee
Galería Isolina Arbulu presents No Man’s Land and Beyond the Visible, two interconnected bodies of work by South Korean artist Kyungtaek Lee, brought together as different stages of a single investigation into photography, landscape and perception.
The exhibition forms part of the ongoing collaboration between Galería Isolina Arbulu, Marbella, and AN INC, Seoul, an exchange conceived to create a dialogue between contemporary artistic practices in Spain and South Korea. Through this collaboration, both galleries seek to explore points of connection between two cultures with distinct histories and traditions, using contemporary art as a space in which new relationships, perspectives and shared sensibilities can emerge.
In No Man’s Land, Lee turns his attention to places where human intervention and nature coexist in a fragile balance. Roads, walls, abandoned structures and other traces of civilisation emerge within landscapes that seem to be slowly reclaiming them. Rather than documenting these places in a conventional sense, Lee searches for moments of ambiguity: spaces in which it is difficult to determine what is disappearing and what will remain.
Beyond the Visible continues this enquiry while radically transforming the photographic image itself.
Lee prints his photographs onto hanji, traditional Korean paper prepared using age-old techniques. He then wets the surface and manually scrubs away areas of pigment, allowing parts of the original image to blur or disappear. The remaining fragments are remounted using baejeob, a traditional Korean mounting method.
The gesture is both destructive and constructive. By removing information, Lee creates a new image.
What begins as a photograph — infinitely reproducible by nature — becomes a unique physical object marked by the artist's hand. The fibres of the paper, the traces of pigment and the areas that have been erased become as significant as the photographic subject itself.
Across the two series, the subjects change, but the underlying question remains the same: how much can an image really tell us about what we are looking at?
Landscapes, architecture and human presence become starting points for questioning the apparent certainty of photography. Lee deliberately withholds information, resisting the speed with which contemporary images are consumed and understood.
In a visual culture that encourages us to see quickly and move on, his work asks for the opposite: to slow down, to remain with the image and to pay attention to what is missing.
No Man’s Land and Beyond the Visible can therefore be understood not as separate projects, but as successive chapters of the same exploration. From observing the traces left by human beings on the landscape to physically erasing the photographic surface itself, Lee moves photography away from documentation and towards perception.
In the context of the collaboration between Galería Isolina Arbulu and AN INC, Lee’s work also becomes a meeting point between tradition and contemporaneity, and between Korean and European ways of seeing. His use of traditional Korean materials and processes within contemporary photography reflects the wider purpose of this exchange: not simply to bring artists from one country to another, but to create meaningful encounters between cultures through artistic practice.
What disappears does not leave an empty space. It creates another way of seeing.
