ABSENCE WITHOUT LEAVE by Kang Seung Lee

Kang Seung Lee's exhibition Absence without leave (2017) at Commonwealth & Council (Los Angeles) employs various display methods: scanned and enlarged photographs of drawings, printed fabric draped in the form of a chair, a framed drawing hung on a mural. Each image conjures the departed through absence. Lee has altered and redrawn iconic representations of male bodies in public and domestic spaces documented by photographers. In some photographs, the bodies remain anonymous (work by Alvin Baltrop, Leonard Fink, and William Yang); others profess an intimacy with their subject (portrait of David Wojnarowicz by Peter Hujar and Martin Wong by Peter Bellamy) or are examples of the artist’s oeuvre (Isaac Julien’s film noir staircase and Robert Mapplethorpe’s self-portrait).

Kang Seung Lee (b. South Korea) is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in Los Angeles. Kang has had solo exhibitions at Pitzer College Art Galleries, Pitzer College (Claremont, CA), ArtPACE (San Antonio, TX), Commonwealth and Council (Los Angeles, CA), Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (Los Angeles, CA), Centro Cultural Border (Mexico City), and group exhibitions at Weatherspoon Art Museum at UNCG (NC), SOMArts (San Francisco, CA), LAXART(Los Angeles, CA), Raymond Gallery at Art Center College of Design (Pasadena, CA), among many others. His work has been reviewed and featured in Artforum, The New York Times, New York Magazine, Artnet Magazine, LA Weekly, Hyperallergic, Artillery Magazine, KCET Artbound and Glasstire. He received an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts).

ISBN 978-0-9985006-1-4
March 2017, English, 8.5 x 11 in, 28 pages, b&w, softcover
Design: Sming Sming Books