Can two artists born in the same year, worlds apart, and never having met make work that is eerily similar to each other? That’s the premise behind one of the more thoughtful and introspective shows on view during this year’s Venice Biennale. The two artists in question are James Lee Byars and Seung-taek Lee, both born in 1932, in Detroit and in Kowon (present-day North Korea), respectively. Their parallel interests extend from the material and the immaterial, the performative, the literary, the celestial and the lunar, the wind and breath. More than anything, they are both artists whose work has never fit into neat categories or movements but with practices that prized themselves on being open ended.  royalqq

At the Palazzo Loredan, the seat of the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, these two artists are presented in conversation. Curated by Allegra Pesenti, the exhibition acts as a follow-up to one staged last fall in London at Michael Werner Gallery, which represents the Byars estate and has provided the major support for the exhibition, along with Gallery Hyundai, Lee’s Seoul gallery. In some rooms, Pesenti has intentionally mixed works by the two artists that can make it difficult to immediately determine whose work is whose.  royalqq

“Sometimes the conversations are eerily similar,” Pesenti told ARTnews during a walkthrough of the exhibition, which runs through August 25. 

The setting of the Palazzo Loredan, once owned by the Loredan family, which produced three Doges and now a working scientific library, adds to the quiet serenity in this exhibition consisting of nearly 70 works. Because the palazzo’s status as an active place of scholarly research all of the works in the show must be hung in a such a way that the bookshelves are still accessible. Several appear to float, mirroring the two artist’s interest in the wind. 

Take for example Byars’s iconic World Flag (1991), consisting of strips of gold lamé, that hangs from the library’s mezzanine. As you walk by the lamé very subtly rustles as your body displaces air. The work finds its near twin in Lee’s Wind (Paper Tree), ca. 1980–89, consisting of strips of white Mulberry Hanji paper that are draped from five tree branches. It hangs on the other side of the room, gently catching the earlier breeze you created as you sauntered past World Flag.  

There’s also a sensuality present in many of the two artists’ works on view, whether it be The Golden Divan (1990) or The Monument to Cleopatra (1988), two all-gold works by Byars, or in sculptures like Lee’s Hip (1962) or Torso (ca. 1960–69), gold leaf sculptures of those parts of a woman’s body that are wrapped, constrained almost, by wire. In somewhat of a call-and-response—push-and-pull between the two artists if you will—Pesenti has place Byars is Elephant (1997), an installation of a large ball of Egyptian rope surrounded by lengths of gold fabric, nearby.  royalqq