Renowned as one of Korea’s most dynamic living makers, Lee’s fourth exhibition has arrived at Goldmark. Poet Frank Montesonti – the potter’s son-in-law – illuminates his latest body of work.
Kang-hyo Lee in his studio
Over the years, I have come to know Kang-hyo Lee quite well. He is my father-in-law. Every summer, as his two grandsons sleep peacefully on a mat indoors, I sit with him in his studio on long evenings, drinking makgeolli and saying little. We admire the subtle curves of the mountains, listen to frogs in the rice field, and wait for the inevitable rain to arrive. Kang-hyo Lee has often remarked that if he were not an artist, he would like to be a monk. Indeed, he often speaks like a sage, in complex, shifting metaphors that conclude in keen aphorisms. To introduce this show, I asked him to write some lines of verse about his work, and I will shift between my prose and his poetry as needed for illumination.
Vase, Buncheong inlay, 2026
In his fourth show at Goldmark Gallery, Kang-hyo Lee exhibits new work that digs deeper into the primary forces under the classic elements of wind, water, air, and fire that his work has explored in the past. To do so, the new collection uses an abundance of inlay – carving into leather-hard clay bodies and then filling the voids with slip. The Sanggan (inlay) vases embody this inquiry most strikingly.
Kang-hyo writes of the vases: The atom is a universe unto itself; through its bonding, rises the macrocosm. The Sanggan vases possess a theme, yet simultaneously have no theme. They appear at times as a river stone, at others, as a seed.
Vase, Buncheong inlay, 2026
As forms capture this amorphous energy, the Buncheong slip on iron-rich clay permutes the endless combinations of light and dark. The work feels less like vases than definers of space itself –objects that confront the paradox that any space must be defined by its walls. Viewing them in a series, I find myself repeating the Heart Sutra: ‘Form is emptiness, emptiness is form’. These sculptural vases arise from the contradictions of the void, but they also leave room for a human to place a single flower.
The Sanggan vase series is a fine example of a central purpose that binds all Kang-hyo Lee’s work together: the desire to capture energy and movement in objects. Form and gestural application of slip in the Buncheong tradition are mainstays of his work, but in this show, the inlay makes stronger gestures of movement.
Kang-hyo writes: I express this motion as wind. Matter moving through the lines of inlay. Though the wind remains invisible, it leaves behind traces of its force.
The other primary series in the show is the Buncheong Water-Mountain series. One summer, while some guests visited his studio, I witnessed the glazing process. Kang-hyo packs wet clay onto the bases of the leather-hard vessels to cover the areas where he wants the surface left unglazed. Then, drawing from a large bucket of pure white slip made from local minerals, he pours it over the work, letting the flowing liquid form mountain-like silhouettes. The vessels suggest a stone more than a vase. The necks have disappeared. The lines of the body are flatter, more jagged. Expressive, unbalanced. Polished and unpolished surfaces collide like the angular clasts of breccia rock. After the firings, the iron from the clay surfaces through the slip, revealing neutral browns.
Kang-hyo Lee in his studio
Pouring is the expressive act, the act that captures the energy. Pure expression has been on the artist’s mind since the last Goldmark show. In the summer of 2024, as part of my ‘son-in-law’s duties,’ I helped him disassemble crates from the delivery of the colossal work he had built at the GimHae residency. He played loud Samulnori music, and I watched him throw paint on the panels, strike it with his palms, dig at it with his fingers. In dance-like rhythms he was transferring pure energy into the thick paint in an act of pure creative joy.
Kang-hyo writes: A strong work is not merely an object – it is communion itself, an experience of emotion.
The more functional ware in the new collection also breathes this communion. Plates are heavy with inlay, sometimes of the same vortexes as the Sanggan vases, but also of patterns from nature or just the swirl of the rice-straw brush. The surfaces of the wall pieces feel like documentation of the wind’s flow. Some iconography and patterns from the Year of the Dragon and Snake (2024, 2025), the two zodiac signs that his grandsons were born under, slither into the bowls and plates.
Teapots move to rustic wooden handles while the Buncheong vases remain more refined, holding beauty in their proportions, sense of volume and space. Light slip and dark clay meld into the endlessly rich greys of traditional Buncheong ware.
Teapot, Buncheong, 2026
Kang-hyo writes: I am drawn to simple forms. To express simplicity Beautifully requires tremendous effort and pain.
Kang-hyo often remarks on how the ancient, worn mountains of Korea suggest the subtle curves of his work. Some of the work in this show hums this simplicity, and some is charged with expression. It can be hard to reconcile the two ideas, how the same piece can capture peace and simplicity yet also be charged with so much energy, but that is exactly where the power in the work lies.
Mountain Water, Buncheong, 2022
Kang-hyo writes of holding this contradiction between tradition and personal expression in this small lyrical moment, which captures the artist at work: I lift my head and gaze up at the sky. Ah – so *that* is it! The dream of my past life... The dream of my present life...
We are privileged that these moments, balanced between dreams, have been so skillfully worked into ceramic form. Kang-hyo often notes in interviews that every three or four years he challenges himself by taking a new direction in his work. I have been happy to witness this latest cycle that led to this show at Goldmark Gallery.
Rectangular Wall Piece, Buncheong, 2026
Kang-hyo writes: To walk ceaselessly in search of an inexplicable presence hidden within simplicity – that is the life of an artist.
I hope you enjoy the final products of these past three years, that the vessels bring you this ‘inexplicable presence’.
