Baik Art presents an outdoor wall work Untitled (A looter wheels a shopping cart full of diapers) by a multidisciplinary artist Kang Seung Lee who was born in South Korea and now lives and works in Los Angeles. The project was originally rendered with graphite on paper from a found photojournalistic image. It appears that a washed out figure is obtaining a shopping cart full of diapers in the midst of what appears to be fire and smoke. The drawing has been painted from 5.5 x 8 inch graphite on paper to an exterior wall facing La Cienega Blvd. in Culver City, CA. The wall project is on view from April 20 - October 20, 2017.
Lee is interested in the lives lost, injured, and communities destroyed during multi-ethnic race conflicts. He focuses on the racial conflict in the United States marked by growing discontent between the residents of disadvantaged, working class neighborhoods and the immigrant, merchant class. Lee takes a special interest in growing migrant communities that embrace their foreign identities rather than wholly adapting Eurocentric and Western ideals. He engages the removal of human bodies and re-rendering motionless figures in graphite to show how bodies could represent society by provoking public interest against socio-political problems. The sketches are drawn from images that involve city residence violence which re-explore a historical narrative through a contemporary lens.
Kang Seung Lee has participated in exhibitions at Pitzer College Art Galleries in Claremont, CAm Commonwealth and Council (Los Angeles, CA), Centro Cultural Border (Mexico City), with group exhibitions at Weatherspoon Art Museum at UNCG (NC), and SOMArts (San Francisco, CA). He received an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts).