Art Projects International is pleased to announce IL LEE: New Ballpoint. In 2025, Il Lee is once again fully embracing the practice of energetically drawing with ballpoint pen on canvas and paper. Lee started to become well known for these large-scale, non-representational works through his exhibitions at Art Projects International in the 1990s. Since that time, he has widely shown his line-based abstractions, both those in ballpoint pen and those made in paint, at gallery exhibitions, museums, and other institutions throughout the world.

Given the current popularity of the Korean artists associated with the Dansaekhwa (monochromatic painting) movement that developed during the period Lee studied art in Korea in the 1960s and 1970s, it is tempting to simply describe Lee as an heir to that movement. Il Lee has a better claim than most to this heritage — Lee Ufan’s influence was at its zenith during Il Lee’s time as a student, and Park Seo-Bo was his advisor during his junior and senior years in college. That said, Lee’s work is best understood as the labor of an idiosyncratic pioneer who has not forgotten his origins but strives to create a larger space for himself on the global stage of contemporary art practice. His singular approach has been honed through daily work, pursued, year after year, in a Brooklyn studio.

Il Lee is known for creating monumental forms by orchestrating layering of dynamic, free-flowing (yet highly controlled) ballpoint pen lines. In this current exhibition, New Ballpoint, a recent 2025 work BL-2502 is non-representational but can be seen as one of Lee’s signature landscape silhouettes. Multitudes of blue ballpoint ink lines form the ridge and mass of a “mountain,” or for others, a “wave.” The same looping lines are less dense in the lower part of the work and become individually visible — singular line building form and lines freeing themselves from form being an Il Lee hallmark.

BL-2501 features a solid off-kilter object. On the left side, where the individual lines creating the massive shape are revealed, the viewer sees that rather than loops of lines, Lee has drawn relatively straight, discrete lines. Moving right, the lines become more and more dense, creating the impressive tilting form. BL-2407 also uses similar straight shorter marks — here in the upper right-hand corner is a blue solarized sun with the abbreviated straight paths of its particles of dark light radiating out to the other edges of the canvas. BL-2503 whether seen as an abstracted landscape or the central horizontal density a resonant transformer with wild twirling thickets of lines pealing off of it, a crackling discharge of electricity, viewers bring their personal histories to Lee’s work.

Lee moved to New York in 1977 and within four years was producing work using ballpoint pen that we recognize as the origins of his current practice. New Ballpoint at Art Projects International is a chance to see the most recent examples of Il Lee’s mature style, to see an artist exhibiting mastery over all his influences and experimentations.