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put_badly
Kang Seung Lee
Put Badly, 2022
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Kang Seung Lee’s work Put Badly (2022) draws from the poem by the Korean poet Gi Hyeong-do. Gi is one of the most widely recognized names in Korean modern poetry. His corpse was found at the Pagoda Theater, a gay sex venue in central Seoul, after having a heart attack in 1989. He was 29 years old. The circumstances of Gi’s death and his sexuality have been systematically covered up and ignored by mainstream scholars afterwards. In Lee’s work, the English translation of his poem, Put Badly, is written out in Martin Wong’s ASL font that the artist created based on Wong’s paintings from the 80s and 90s. Martin Wong, a Chino-Latino-American painter, was a fixture of New York’s East Village art scene in the 1980s. The largely self-taught artist often considered the intersections of race, sexuality, and history in his urban environment, and passed away from complications related to AIDS in 1999.
Kang Seung Lee (b. 1978) lives and works in Los Angeles. His multi-disciplinary practice places emphasis on marginalized individual experiences and personal histories challenging singular mainstream history/knowledge, which is often narrow, biased and first-world oriented. His work frequently engages in the legacy of queer histories, particularly when they intersect with art history.
