Artist Yi Chul Hee creates amazing, innovative sculptures composed of stacked layers of pipes. Unexpected shapes and forms emerge from his carefully crafted piles of hollow tubes. Each piece plays with light and shadow, allowing it to seep through and visually shift with each change of perspective. Intricately pieced together to give depth and an illusion of solid forms, Hee’s balanced creations juxtapose solid and vacant space to form three-dimensional sculptural masterpieces.
Applying the halftone effect—a technique that makes use of dots (or in this case, negative space within the pipes)—the Korean artist's sharply cut pipes translate into fully formed and well-rounded final figures. His halftone technique also generates a continuous gradient effect. Piece by piece Hee slices the material and layers the pipe lengths together to form complex forms.
Despite this process being a self-proclaimed costly and labor-intensive form of creation, Hee gets great enjoyment from his craft, saying: “I am captivated by the well-arranged, scientific, and regularly repeated rhythm. It seems that I will be doing this work for my whole life.”
Hee also creates sculptures of gesturing hands…
Majestically posing animals…
Enlarged tiny objects…
Miniaturized large objects…
And even some hypnotizing abstract pieces.
