For Il Lee, uncapping a ballpoint pen makes him feel like a shaman. Not that he has the power to ward off evil spirits, but one glance at the artist’s enormous drawings, penned entirely in ballpoint, can explain the sentiment. Each dense mass, the edges diminishing into a fray of straight or coiled markings, requires a physical stamina that is otherworldly.

On a recent Saturday afternoon, Lee is standing in front of BL-078 (2006) at Art Projects International (API), the Manhattan-based gallery that has represented his work since 1996. This large-scale canvas is speckled with solid masses of ink connected by a web of fine lines. It is one of many pieces inked in his basement studio in Brooklyn, where Lee’s full-body performance, sans audience, begins. Attacking the paper or canvas, Lee’s hand-gripped pen sweeps up his shoulders, traveling down his back to his legs, often for a stretch of seven hours. 

“I feel like I’m going to bury everything: my anger, my happiness, my silence, whatever,” says Lee. “I’m going to bury it inside. Whatever you see [in] my work, it is energetic and like a furious motion. I never premeditated before starting the work. It’s a very strong immediacy.”

“It reminds me of my younger days in Korea when my grandmother would invite the shaman to do a dance,” adds Jung Lee Sanders, the founding director of API. “It’s incredible watching a shaman perform; it’s almost like he or she is in another world. You feel that energy [in Lee’s work] because he loses himself.”

At API, the color of Lee’s ink transforms depending on where or how the sun spills through the gallery windows. The change in hue is a new evolution. Lee, who has exhausted more than 30,000 ballpoint pens throughout his career, switched from black to blue three years ago after the Paper Mate brand he had used for two decades reformulated its ink, making the color appear less potent. He switched to blue, and upon recently discovering the Staples brand of black, now uses both colors.

Born in South Korea in 1952, Lee is among the first generation of Korean-born artists living in New York City. He studied painting at Seoul’s Hong-Ik University, and continued his art education at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute. After receiving his M.F.A. in1976, Lee’s artistic vision co-existed with a long string of part-time jobs selling clothes in Chinatown or hemming men’s pants. Lee stood out from the handful of serious Korean artists living in New York City in the mid-1990s, when Sanders first visited his studio. Through API’s representation, Lee was able to recently transition into a full-time artist. His income, which helps to support his wife and two sons, is now independently derived from sold art.

Similar to most American artists that hail from Asia, Lee’s distinct voice is a hybrid of two cultures. While his linear elegance gave a nod to the scholarly art form of Eastern calligraphy, his method of drawing energetic lines using an accessible medium broke contemporary ground.