Lee Bae, Jean-Michel Othoniel transform the French Embassy into a dialogue of charcoal and glass

The French Embassy in Seoul opened the exhibit “Lee Bae – Jean-Michel Othoniel: Regards Croisés” on Monday, the first time the two artists' works have been shown together.

Fifteen works — four Othoniel sculptures, five Lee sculptures and six of the latter’s charcoal-ink paintings — have been placed in the embassy's gardens and the Residence of France in Seodaemun District, western Seoul.

The show is one of the anchor events marking the 140th anniversary of Korea-France diplomatic relations, timed to coincide with the opening of Frieze Seoul on Wednesday. From next week, it will be open to the general public by reservation only.

Lee is a prolific contemporary minimalist artist, born in 1956, known best for his charcoal-only works. He shuttles between Paris and Seoul, and 23 of his works are currently installed in the twelfth-century Cistercian abbey of Beaulieu-en-Rouergue.

Othoniel, a French artist who has worked with a number of different media, is displaying works in glass at the new exhibition. His works are handblown bricks and mirrored beads threaded onto steel to resemble huge necklaces. Since Othoniel's first visit to Korea in 2010, he has begun using gold leaf on stainless steel, creating works that resemble flower blossoms.

“Korea was not simply a territory for me to discover,” Othoniel said during a press tour of the embassy compound on Monday. “It gave me a new reading of my own work.”

Both the embassy's main pavilion and the Residence of France were designed by renowned modernist architect Kim Chung-up, who had worked in pioneering French-Swiss architect Le Corbusier’s atelier in France in the early 1950s.

Both buildings are sculptures themselves, French cultural counselor Pierre Morcos explained. The new show at the embassy pairing Lee and Othoniel is three encounters at once — two masters, works and place, and the two countries.

The curators of the show, Morcos and Ludovic Guillot, director of artistic creation at the Institut Français in Paris, pointed to reciprocity and co-creativity as two common values Korea and France could share with the world.

“For a long time, we were in a one-way logic,” Morcos said. “French culture toward Korea, Korean culture toward France. What we want today is a logic of co-creation.”

Korea and France have now become two leading cultural powers, and the next step is for their artists to collaborate. That is the ambition behind Villa Hanbul, the residency network launched during French President Emmanuel Macron’s state visit to Korea in April, which will place six French artists in Gwangju, Cheongju and Busan. It is also the philosophy behind the Lumière summit on cinema and the moving image, to take place next Monday at Saint-Paul de Vence, co-chaired by Macron and President Lee Jae Myung.

“Thirty years in Paris were what allowed me to find myself as a Korean artist — a country where civilizations collect and none is asked to surrender itself, which the French call tolerance and stretch to mean several other things besides,” Lee Bae said. “Making work is closer to prayer than to production. Not the manufacture of something the world needs, but an encounter with whatever sits deepest in a person, unreachable without a certain innocence.”

The “Lee Bae – Jean-Michel Othoniel: Regards Croisés” exhibition runs until Jan. 11 next year. Reservations can be made through the Embassy of France in Korea's official website, and regular updates on available spots can be checked on the embassy’s Instagram page.

BY LIM JEONG-WON [lim.jeongwon@joongang.co.kr]