Clay holds the memory of the earth, and fire breathes a new life into that memory.

The ceramics of Lee Jong Soo (1935–2008) trace a journey of vision and touch forged through more than half a century of sustained engagement with nature, mediated by the twin forces of clay and fire. His practice took shape within the soil and climate of his region and through the material he held onto throughout his life. This exhibition brings into view not only that material ground, but also the mental and aesthetic strata that underpin it.

Lee’s ceramics embody an attitude that respects the physicality of clay and the sense of time inherent within it, while carefully attending to the actions of fire and air. He regarded the flow of glaze, changes occurring during firing, and variations in surface texture as outcomes in themselves, focusing on states produced jointly by material and process. Such an approach gives each work a distinct presence, leaving on the ceramic surface traces in which time and environment have settled. His works are less the product of a technique aimed at formal completion than accumulations of a long-term relationship with clay as material.

At the same time, his practice reveals a formal flexibility grounded in traditional ceramic structures without being constrained by their rules. Subtle shifts in proportion, uneven surface treatments, and gentle deviations in form generate both tension and openness. Within the framework of inherited methods, these qualities register a contemporary sensibility, positioning his vessels not as decorative objects but as sculptural entities that traverse the boundary between use and contemplation.

This attitude resonates, albeit implicitly, with the working philosophy of Goam Lee Ungno (1904–1989), who understood nature not as something to be depicted but as a field through which energy and rhythm circulate. Rooted in the East Asian aesthetic principle that calligraphy and painting share a common origin, Lee Ungno expanded brushwork beyond the replication of form into traces left by movement and breath. In his character abstractions and Crowd series, the liveliness of the mark and the density generated by action take precedence over meticulous control of the pictorial surface.

Lee Jong Soo’s ceramics likewise take shape within such an understanding. He observed to the very end the processes generated by the interaction of clay, fire, air, and time, accepting the changes that emerged in the course of making as integral to the work itself rather than fixing outcomes in advance. His forms do not pursue total control, but are shaped through a mode of making in which material and process jointly give rise to form. Here, despite working with different substances—ink and paper, clay and fire—both artists share an ethic of respecting the inherent properties and flows of their materials and responding to them. Form is not the execution of a preordained plan, but something gradually drawn forth within the time where material and action intersect.

The exhibition title, Clay, Play, Stay, succinctly articulates Lee Jong Soo’s artistic world. Clay names the material he pursued throughout his life as a ground of being; Play refers to the sustained process of testing and adjustment carried out within the rhythms of hand, time, and fire; Stay designates the place where these accumulated times come to rest—not a fixed moment of completion, but layers of sensation permeating surface and form.

In Lee’s ceramics, form is never decided at once. Through repeated cycles of making, revising, and rebuilding, shape slowly acquires its contours, and the process itself becomes part of the work. This repetition functions both as sculptural experimentation and as an index of a life lived in long-term relation with clay. Clay, Play, Stay follows the trajectory by which work that begins with earth ultimately arrives at a time of dwelling, quietly revealing the material depth and accumulated temporality of Lee Jong Soo’s ceramics.

This notion of “staying” extends beyond individual works to encompass the artist’s life and the time of a place. The year 2026 marks the groundbreaking of the Lee Jong Soo Ceramics Museum in Daejeon, and this retrospective stands at that point of departure, clearly rearticulating the significance of Lee Jong Soo as an artist born of the city. Formed within the region’s soil and climate, his sculptural language is now poised to remain in a single site, accruing time anew. Before his ceramics—where clay, fire, breath, and time are layered upon one another—we are invited to reconsider how the time of nature and the time of humanity have been gathered into a single form. It is hoped that this exhibition will serve as an occasion for Lee Jong Soo’s sculptural language to be more widely uncovered and more deeply discussed.