When does emptiness become form? For Korean sculptor Lee Yong-deok, the answer has defined a lifetime of work. By inverting the very premise of sculpture, he transformed voids into presence, absence into vision — creating the world’s first “inverted sculptures.” This autumn, his groundbreaking art makes its long-awaited debut in New York.

The first reaction is often disbelief.
At a recent exhibition in Seoul, a child pointed in wonder, shouting, “A person is popping out of the wall!” In Germany, an elderly man murmured that the strange experience reminded him of Einstein’s relativity. At KIAF Seoul this September, throngs of visitors lined up to take selfies, marveling as the faces carved into the walls seemed to turn and follow their gaze. What looked like convex, protruding forms revealed themselves, upon closer inspection, to be concave voids — empty spaces sculpted into illusionary life.

This uncanny magic belongs to Lee Yong-deok (66), the Korean sculptor who invented the very concept of the inverted sculpture. It is a world-first, born not from theory but from his own imagination — a radical overturning of centuries of sculptural tradition. Where art history had long assumed that “sculpture = convex,” Lee dared to carve absence itself, making emptiness the source of form. For more than forty years, he has refined, systematized, and championed this singular vision.

Now, his world-defining works are heading to the capital of modern art. From October 2 to November 15, New York’s Gallery AP Space will host his solo exhibition “Inverted Sculpture, Forms Revealed Through Absence.” It will be Lee’s first solo show in the city, presenting 23 works including his celebrated piece Laughter.

“In the 1980s, I didn’t want to follow the fashions of art movements,” Lee recalled. “I wanted to create work centered on humans. That pursuit led me to think of yin and yang — not as opposites, but as a single harmonious force. I wanted to capture that unity, something present yet absent, absent yet present.”

From childhood epiphany to global stage
Lee’s journey began in the alleys of Hongje-dong, Seoul. As a boy, he shaped tanks and people from the mud along the Hongjecheon stream. Around the age of ten, he turned his school shoe pouch inside out and noticed something astonishing: the bag’s shape remained the same, whether inside or outside. That small discovery — that form could be preserved through reversal — would guide the rest of his life.

His inverted sculptures capture ordinary human gestures: laughing, walking, washing, reading. Yet they also carry monumental weight. Public commissions such as the Cardinal Kim Soo-hwan Statue at Myeongdong Cathedral, the Pope Francis Statue, and the Yu Gwan-sun Statue in Seoul’s Samil Park prove that his art is not only about optical illusion but also about memory, history, and presence carved out of absence.

A long-awaited New York debut
Lee has shown actively across Europe and Asia, yet New York remained, in his words, “strangely distant.” Now, that absence will finally become presence. “Through this exhibition, I want to properly introduce inverted sculpture to New York,” he said. “I hope it will serve as a bridge for K-Art to reach further into the world.”

The exhibition is accompanied by a newly published art book, “Lee Yong-deok’s Inverted Sculpture,” compiling essays by ten art historians, critics, and curators on the aesthetic and historical significance of his invention, alongside an expansive photographic archive of his works.

Sculpting the void
What began as a child’s fascination with the reversible form of a fabric pouch has grown into a radical sculptural philosophy. Lee’s inverted sculptures challenge not only the eye but also the very foundations of existence: what it means to be present, what it means to be absent, and how the two coexist as one.

As New York audiences encounter his world-first works this autumn, they will be asked to reconsider what sculpture can be — not solid mass, but the void itself, sculpted into life.

SayArt.net
Jason Yim, yimjongho1969@gmail.com