The Silence and the Sales Curve: Lee Bae's Charcoal Enters a Cistercian Abbey
Paris, around 1990. Lee Bae, a painter newly arrived from Cheongdo, South Korea, has no money for oil paint or canvas. Rent alone strains what little he has. He needs a material he can afford, and at a modest shop — by most accounts a gas station or a neighborhood supermarket — he finds an inexpensive bag of ordinary barbecue charcoal, the kind sold for grilling, not for art. He buys it anyway. Nothing about the material asks to be looked at — it is fuel, ash-black and cheap. But he opens the bag, turns a lump over in his hand, and does not put it down. That small act of thrift, a poor painter buying what he could afford instead of what he wanted, becomes, over the following decades, one of the more improbable turns in contemporary art.
Charcoal is wood that has already died once — burned, blackened, reduced — yet it does not simply end there. Lee Bae found in it a material that had passed through fire and come out the other side, still capable of holding form, still capable of becoming something else in a second act. He would later describe charcoal as carrying "birth and extinction, regeneration," and over nearly thirty years he worked it from raw lumps into a refined carbon-black pigment, without ever letting go of its rough, burnt origin.
The abbey he now occupies carries its own story of ruin and return. Founded in the twelfth century and drawn formally into the Cistercian order in 1197, Beaulieu-en-Rouergue followed the order's austere code: one nave, few windows, walls braced by buttresses rather than ornament. Abandoned during the French Revolution, it stood as ruin until collectors Geneviève Bonnefoi and Pierre Brache rescued it in the 1950s; eighteen months of restoration returned it to the public in 2022. Lee Bae's own path ran in parallel — a French honor in 2018, and in 2023 a seven-meter charcoal sculpture in Rockefeller Center's outdoor Channel Gardens plaza, the first such placement there by a Korean artist, even as two other Korean artists, Park Seo-Bo and Jin Meyerson, showed concurrently in an indoor gallery at the same site as part of the same program.
The pairing was not incidental. CMN president Marie Lavandier has said — in remarks translated here from her original French — that with its 110 monuments, the Centre is "an infinitely renewed source of inspiration for artists" and "a resonance chamber for contemporary creation." This exhibition, curated by critic Henri-François Debailleux with Galerie Perrotin, tests that claim directly. Twenty-three works, spanning painting, sculpture, video and installation, sit inside a building whose own aesthetic of restraint, mass and bare stone was settled centuries before Lee Bae ever picked up a piece of charcoal.
There is also a plainer, more mercantile way to read this pairing. The volume of Lee Bae's works changing hands at auction has reportedly grown several-fold since 2021 — a marked expansion in market activity, though no independently confirmed figure for price appreciation exists. "En attendant" is staged jointly by the Centre des Monuments Nationaux — the state agency overseeing 110 national monuments — and Galerie Perrotin, the artist's own commercial gallery.
What each side gets from the arrangement isn't hard to sketch. A heritage agency built around stone masonry and church interiors picks up, for a season, the visibility and foot traffic that contemporary art brings with it. An artist and gallery riding a rising market pick up something a hotter market cannot purchase directly — the standing of a twelfth-century national monument attached to the work. Neither fact makes the show dishonest; it only means the abbey's walls are doing at least two jobs at once, and both are worth naming plainly.
The show's own language leans harder on affinity than the facts strictly support. Lee Bae frames charcoal through "birth and extinction, regeneration" — a material philosophy of impermanence shaped in part by his own Korean formation. Beaulieu-en-Rouergue, by contrast, was raised for a specific Christian monastic discipline, Cistercian silence and asceticism, centuries before that vocabulary of his existed.
Lavandier's translated line — an "infinitely renewed source of inspiration" and a "resonance chamber for contemporary creation" — is loose enough to fit almost any serious artist set inside almost any solemn old building. On its own, it doesn't say whether this particular pairing is doing real curatorial work linking two distinct spiritual traditions, or whether "resonance" is standing in for an argument the show never quite makes.
What complicates the neat symmetry further is scale. Against the abbey's single narrow nave, Lee Bae installs "Brushstroke: Jacob's Ladder," a twenty-five-meter run of marks, alongside bronze figures rising some ten meters — dimensions closer to industry than to a monk's cell. The sober twelfth-century walls, built to hold nothing but silence, now hold instead the blown-up aftermath of fire, at a size the Cistercians who raised those buttresses never had reason to plan for.
A cheap bag of grilling charcoal, a stone building emptied of ornament, and an art market slow to notice either — none of these were arranged to meet. They meet now, through September, in a nave built for quiet and hung instead with the record of something burned. On the other side of the world, in Wonju, the same title, "Waiting," runs concurrently through December, in a building with no Cistercian history at all to lend it weight. Set those two venues side by side in your head, the twelfth-century abbey and the ordinary museum in Wonju — which one, if either, do you think is actually shaping how you read the charcoal on the walls?
SOURCES : ftoday, monuments-nationaux
