Chunkook Lee's sculptures occupy a space between ornament and organism, digital simulation and material presence. Drawing from church architecture, medieval imagery, video-game environments, and the slow rhythms of natural growth, his work explores how forms persist and evolve in an age saturated with images. In this conversation, Lee reflects on the origins of his practice, the role of ornament in contemporary culture, and the possibilities of sculpture in the post-digital era.

RARARES Gallery: Your work draws together references from nature, ornament, mythology, and digital culture. Looking back, what first shaped your artistic imagination?

Lee Chunkook: Lately, I've been thinking a great deal about churches and medieval ornament. I grew up in a pastor's family in Korea, and many of my earliest memories are tied to church spaces.

What interests me now is not only medieval imagery itself, but the particular way it appeared in Korea. Many churches were built quickly and economically, yet they still sought to create a sense of the spiritual. Instead of stained glass, for example, printed films were often applied to windows to imitate its effect. Looking back, I find that practical and lightweight approach to creating a sacred atmosphere both curious and compelling. At the same time, many of the medieval worlds I encountered came not through history, but through the video games I played growing up. Although I never experienced that era, I feel a strange nostalgia toward it.

More recently, I've taken up growing plants at home. Looking back, I can see how these different influences—church architecture, simulated medieval imagery, and living plants—have gradually intertwined and become central to the sculptural language I am developing today.


RARARES Gallery: Ornament plays a central role in your work. What first drew you to it as a subject?

Lee Chunkook: I was initially attracted to ornament because of the way it historically expressed hierarchy, power, and value through visual form. Ornament once functioned as a visible structure of meaning.

Today, much of that shared symbolic meaning has dissolved. When ornament loses its original purpose, it can reveal a kind of emptiness rather than conceal it. That condition interests me.

My approach is less about recovering lost meanings and more about observing how forms continue to expand and proliferate within an image-saturated environment. I am interested in ornament as a kind of bodily growth or swelling. At the same time, I wonder whether these contemporary and often lightweight medieval references might eventually acquire new meanings of their own.


RARARES Gallery: Many of your sculptures appear to grow beyond their own limits, with overgrown surfaces and inflated forms. What does excess mean to you?

Lee Chunkook: I see excess as a way for form to assert its presence in a situation where stable meanings have become uncertain. Rather than restoring meaning, excess generates intensity. Overgrown surfaces and accumulated forms resemble biological responses within a changing environment. They continue to expand, refusing to disappear. In that sense, excess becomes a way of keeping something active. It allows forms to remain present and persistent within the conditions of the time we live in.

RARARES Gallery: Your practice moves fluidly between digital modeling and traditional craft. How do these different processes interact in your work?

Lee Chunkook: For me, digital modeling and handcraft are not opposites but different stages within a single process. Digital systems offer control, simulation, and precision. Yet once a form enters the physical world, deviation is inevitable. Gravity, fragility, and surface irregularities all begin to play a role.

I often work with processes such as glass and metal casting, where materials are liquefied and transformed before solidifying again. These methods allow physical forces to become visible. I don't try to eliminate the tension between digital design and material reality. If the digital model establishes a structure, the act of making introduces unpredictability.


RARARES Gallery: Sculpture today is often encountered first through a screen. How has the circulation of digital images changed the way you think about sculptural presence?

Lee Chunkook: Today, sculpture is frequently experienced as an image before it is encountered as an object. Digital circulation compresses scale, texture, and weight into a flat surface, shaping our expectations before we ever stand in front of the work.
I am interested in the gap between image and body: the distance between what we imagine and what we physically encounter. Digital processes allow me to construct forms that seem liberated from gravity, but the handmade object reintroduces material density and physical presence. When viewed in person, sculpture can interrupt the smoothness of its digital representation and create a different kind of experience.


RARARES Gallery: Nature and small, overlooked details often appear in your work. What draws you to these seemingly minor elements?

Lee Chunkook: Perhaps because we have become accustomed to passively absorbing so much information, I find myself increasingly drawn to things that demand a more active form of attention.

Among the countless images and impressions that pass us by, certain experiences remain because they are felt directly, almost through the body. For this reason, I am attracted to ordinary and specific things—plants, fragments, traces, and small encounters that might otherwise go unnoticed.

These modest presences invite a slower and more subjective way of looking.


RARARES Gallery: Contemporary sculpture can no longer rely on universally shared symbols in the way it once did. What can sculpture still offer viewers today?

Lee Chunkook: I believe sculpture can still offer a bodily experience.

Rather than transmitting fixed meanings, it can create conditions of perception. Scale, weight, distance, texture, and spatial relationships are first encountered physically before they are interpreted intellectually. In that sense, sculpture offers more than information. Even when experienced through images, it can suggest a presence that exceeds the screen and invites a deeper sensory engagement.


RARARES Gallery: When you step away from theory and context, what continues to motivate you in the studio?

Lee Chunkook: In reality, I rarely think in explicitly theoretical terms while working. Most of my time is spent negotiating between the image of an ideal work and the limits of my own technical abilities. The process often feels like a continuous conversation between intention and material constraint.

What sustains me is probably the presence of other artists around me: people engaged in similar struggles, working seriously and persistently in close proximity. There is something encouraging about sharing that commitment.


RARARES Gallery: Looking ahead, what questions feel most urgent as you continue to explore sculpture in the post-digital era?

Lee Chunkook: What feels most urgent to me is understanding the conditions under which sculpture exists today. I find myself thinking about how a work is generated, how it operates, and what kinds of experiences it enables or restricts. Rather than focusing solely on form or meaning, I am increasingly interested in the frameworks and circumstances that shape the life of an artwork. Those questions continue to guide my practice as I move forward.