Access a slow-looking exercise related to this work.

Transcript
Marilee Talkington: This work by Lee Kun-Yong is part of a series created between 1976 and 1979. This piece from 1978 features five plywood panels lined up vertically edge-to-edge reaching a full height of 5 1/2 feet tall by 3 feet wide by about an inch deep. Each panel is the same thickness and width but has varying heights. The two central panels are the tallest, each around 2 feet; the top two panels are similar in height, each about 1 foot; and the bottom panel is the shortest, only a few inches high.

The title of this artwork, "The Method of Drawing 76-1 (Drawn from Behind)", reflects Lee’s method of creation. Standing behind a solid plywood board his own height, he reached over the top edge and created a series of lines filling a horizontal section on the front of the board—mark-making without looking at its surface. Lee repeated this five times And each time he finished a horizontal section across the top of the board, he would cut off that section. After creating five individual panels from the original board, he reassembled it inversely, so the topmost panel in this work was the bottom of the original plywood board.

Lee used an oil-based black marker pen to create marks directly on the surface of the plywood. These appear as a frenetic series of scrawling vertical lines stretching across the width of each panel. Like the lines in a heart monitor or polygraph, they are drawn as if he kept the point of the pen on the wood and swung it up and down. Some lines overlap, some reach the edge of the panel, and some stop short. During the cutting process, sometimes the particularly high or low lines were sliced through. This means that in the final work, these lines appear to overreach the seam where the panels meet, spilling onto the next panel.

The line shading varies from dark gray to black and appears darker where the lines are more densely packed and overlapping. They increase in density and appear more symmetrical and vertically oriented in the lower three panels, drawing the viewer’s eyes downward. The lines are so densely packed in the bottom panel that the light tan color of the natural plywood is barely visible.

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