A knife cuts wood,
a body carves labour

Lee Yunyeop's first print, 〈Choi of Sandraemi〉 (1996), did not begin from a grand subject. It began from a neighbour — a farmer who lived close by at the time. The face that emerged from the block was an ordinary one, carved with the bold, unhurried lines that would become the artist's signature.

That choice — to begin with a person within arm's reach rather than a symbol — set the direction of everything that followed. From this first work onward, Lee took up the woodblock in earnest as his primary medium. The subjects would remain the same: farmers, workers, and the humble objects of a working life, rendered with wit and an evident affection.

For Lee Yunyeop, the woodblock is not only a way of making pictures. It is a medium of cutting wood, handling tools, and moving the body — and in that physicality lies its meaning. The labour of carving is, for him, a way of understanding labour itself.

Because the making of the work is itself a kind of work, the act of cutting builds a shared recognition with those who know what it is to work, and draws out an understanding of the value of labour. The choice of materials follows the same logic: he has carved into the rubber matting used on factory floors, working an industrial surface with an engraving knife until it yielded an image.

The result is a body of prints in which form and subject are made of the same substance. The roughness of the bold line is not a style applied to the labouring body from outside — it is the trace of a labouring hand, left in the wood.

Lee Yunyeop calls himself a “dispatch artist” (파견미술가). The term describes a practice rather than a position: carrying the woodblock out of the studio and into strikes and demonstrations, and making prints there, together with the workers who are present.

It is a way of working that places the artist alongside, rather than above, the people the work is about. The image is not composed at a distance and delivered afterward; it is cut on site, in the company of those whose labour and circumstances it depicts. In this practice the woodblock returns to one of its oldest functions — an art made to be shared, quickly and directly, among many hands.

Across sixteen solo exhibitions and numerous group shows — and into the collections of the MMCA, the Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, and Japan's Sakima Art Museum and Fukuoka Asian Art Museum — Lee's work has carried this same conviction: that an art of labour is best made in the places where labour lives.