Lee Gapchul was born in Hapcheon, Gyeongnam, and grew up in Jinju. Currently, he is represented by Galerie VU' in France.
For
more than forty years, Lee Gapchul has documented landscapes permeated with the
Korean land, its people, and the unconscious of the era. His photographs go
beyond simple representation or the recording of events; they capture the
deepest strata of Korean sensibility and collective memory, forming a crucial
terrain in the history of Korean photography.
This
exhibition coincides with the publication of ‘Lee Gapchul: Another
Landscape Theory 1979–2000’ and is organized to expand the academic and
critical discourse surrounding his work. In particular, it is significant for
reconstructing—through a chronological narrative—the long-fragmented axis of
Lee’s thinking that lies behind the powerful imagery of 《Conflict and Reaction》: his photographic
theory, worldview, and spiritual strata.
Although
Lee photographs “landscapes,” what he has consistently contemplated is the
world beyond them—the collective unconscious of Koreans, the vibration of
existence, and the resonance of the 시대. This exhibition rereads the trajectory of his practice from a new
perspective and reaffirms photography as a medium that does not merely “show”
the world, but compels us to “think” it. It marks another turning point in
Korean photography and serves as an important occasion for broadening our
understanding of contemporary images.
