About the Artist

A celebrated Korean-born artist, Il Lee is best known for his ballpoint pen technique. Born in 1952, Lee moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1970s and later settled in a Brooklyn, New York, where he continues to live and work today. Highlighting the process of mark-making, Lee creates etchings, drawings, and oil works characterized by simple yet complex forms. Out of these forms, a movement emerges, which examines the relationship between positive and negative space and, in turn, reflects the forces between serenity and chaos. His gestural lines propose ideas suitable to the intensity, range, and depth of the freely expressed hand, a practice linked to the Korean art of Sumukhwa, a form of ink painting characteristic of a culture whose history proceeds from a traditional, apparently spontaneous activity of great concentration and daily absorption.